Bentley SUV confirmed? Maybe

It’s being reported that Bentley boss Wolfgang Dürheimer has confirmed that the Crewe company are working on a Bentley SUV.

There was a time, not too long ago, when there was a reasonable expectation that most car makers would, at some point, deliver up an SUV. Yes, there was even talk of a Bentley SUV.

But the global meltdown and the global-warmists seemed to have put paid to the concept of an off-road luxury everything, so we all forgot about the SUV plans gathering dust in every car designer’s cupboard. But things are changing.

Things are changing because the world is starting to realise that the global-warmists are wrong, that SUVs are not intrinsically  more ‘polluting’ than any other car and the China factor.

And it’s the China factor that is making the prospect of SUVs from the world’s high-end car makers more likely to happen, although the fact there is no longer open hostility to SUVs makes it more palatable for car makers.

So we can expect a raft of SUV stories to start cropping up in the next year or three. We’ve already had Adrian Hallmark saying Jaguar need an SUV, and now we’ve got Bentley chief Wolfgang Dürheimer saying that Bentley are planning a posh SUV to take on Range Rover.

The problem Bentley has is that the Range Rover is already a Bentley on stilts, and even at its most expensive it is still £50k less than the cheapest Bentley. Which when you consider most would lump the Range Rover in the same league mentally as the Bentley makes the project fraught with problems for the boys from Crewe.

But with a huge chunk of Bentley sales now being made in China, there’s probably going to be enough demand to mop up a £150k SUV from Bentley and make it a profitable project. Especially as Bentley already has the underpinning available in sister company Porsche’s Cayenne.

Just imagine a stretched Cayenne with a Bentley grill, and you won’t be far off.

Source: Auto Motor und Sport