The Bentley Torcal – pronounced Tor-cal – is the company’s first fully electric car, but there’s rather more to talk about than batteries. It takes Bentley into a new part of the SUV market, introduces new materials and technology, and will emerge from a heavily upgraded factory in Crewe.
Then there’s the sound. Bentley’s Dynamic Symphony uses real instruments, including drums, viola and bass guitar, to capture the rhythm of its V8 heritage. The indicator click comes from a recording of a hammer striking leather in Bentley’s upholstery workshops, while the touchscreen and digital assistant’s note comes from a crystal glass. There’s an optional 28-speaker Naim system, too, complete with seat shakers.
To find out how it’s all come together, I chatted to Martin Page, the Torcal’s product line director, about everything from attracting new customers to making a big electric SUV feel like a Bentley. As someone who gets rather excited about cars and audio, I was always going to enjoy hearing more about the Dynamic Symphony. It turns out Martin’s favourite feature is the noise it makes, too.
Why Torcal and why now?
The purpose of Torcal is to offer growth for the company and to that extent, having a product that’s more centred in the sports SUV segment is really important to us – we see that as a segment that’s growing at the moment.
What we really wanted was a product that moves into that sports SUV segment. So, regardless of powertrain, regardless of technology, that was the driving ambition. Then when we look at a number of factors: customer demand, technological routes, obviously the worldwide economic and government situations as well, it became important for us to offer a new powertrain as part of that ambition. And that’s really then what we talk about delivering this luxury of choice as the brand.
Have you genuinely got people queuing up at Bentley retailers, knocking on the door saying, “Where’s my all-electric SUV?”
Yes, we’ve seen some really good intent and we’ve got a good number of individuals already showing good intent towards the vehicle. And what’s most important for that is 40-odd per cent of those people are new to Bentley; they’re people that have never owned a Bentley.
This is a new Bentley, a new part of the portfolio. It’s not an electric Bentayga, it’s a new car in a new market. So really the electrification story isn’t the biggest story in the room and therefore the focus for us has been just to make a great Bentley; make it the next benchmark for extraordinary journeys.
And if we can do that in a way that’s true to everything Bentley stands for, the design language, the DNA, the way it behaves, the fact it’s electric is another part of the broad offer that customers can have. It becomes just another powertrain. So, the focus for us is delivering a car that customers engage with on every level, not just the powertrain level, and that’s where we see the value.
Where will the biggest markets for Torcal be?
I honestly see balance at the moment between America, China, and then let’s call it Europe, UK, and Middle East. I think it will be broadly consistent across those three.
We had a brief show and sell for some media and customers from the Middle East and in an environment where anecdotally oil is cheaper than water, you’d expect that to be one of the lower opportunistic markets. They walked in and they’re just blown away. The powertrain conversation wasn’t relevant.
Who is the Torcal customer?
So far what we’re seeing is 40 per cent of the intent and interest being new to Bentley, which is really important. And they’re either people that have never had any contact with Bentley, which is great, or they’re people that have been in our funnel but haven’t committed to an existing car.
We see that broadly as a slightly younger demographic, which is again good for the brand and a bit of broadening reach into maybe more female buyers as well, but not to the detriment of existing customers and our existing demographic. But it’s part of what we see as really growing the breadth and the appeal of the brand into segments that Bentley hasn’t been seen in before.
You describe the car as having ‘Bentley performance’ – this is a big SUV that does 0 to 60 in 2.8 seconds. So, when I’m in the car and I’ve got all that performance under my right foot, how does it feel?
Firstly, the first thing to say is that the figures you’ve got there are in the launch control mode, and of course that’s a mode that you can choose to access or choose not to. The two driving behaviours are effortless progression and confidence-inspiring character. You dip in and you get that wave of torque that is almost instant and you get that nice consistent and constant progression of power. You don’t find any inflections in the power curve where you suddenly get an extra boost.
Our throttle map and our pedal maps are calibrated in a way that there’s no real peakiness to them. We have a real consistent gradient through the power delivery. And from a standing start, we’re around three and a half seconds, which is without the launch control. And then that is really what gives you that feeling of being totally in control of the vehicle.
We want the vehicle to dominate the road, not the road to dominate the vehicle in a kind of behavioural sense. And to that extent, we’re giving confidence to all our customers that they can access the full potential of the car. And that’s why we haven’t gone down the road of chasing four-figure power numbers and things like that. If you could drive all of our cars blindfolded, the primary control should feel very commensurate with what Bentley’s all about.
You say that Torcal blends the comfort of a Flying Spur with the dynamics of a Continental GT? What were the challenges to get that blend of comfort and agility with a big heavy car?
We made use of the Porsche PPE 41 C platform. That comes with the 800-volt fully active chassis system. What that allows us to do is have ultimate tunability in the way the chassis and the vehicle performance behave. And obviously the battery, yes, it’s a heavy part of the car, but it’s way down low.
We can really stiffen the suspension up super quick and then transition into that dynamic state. As soon as you level out again, if you come off a slip road onto a highway, we can go into that vertical compliance really, really quickly. So that kind of behaviour in the chassis system helps remove some of the feeling of the weight from the car because you’re decoupling it a little bit.
The team took the pitch and roll characteristics of the GT and actively calibrated those back into the car, so that you get this very natural behaviour of the vehicle to the physics that you are inducing into the car.
You settled on a range of a claimed maximum 375 miles. How did you settle on that number? Could you have gone further?
That was what we felt as being a competitive area for the product in its segment. What we focused on more is the speed of charging.
It’s not often you leave home with 375 miles in your car, regardless of powertrain, and don’t stop for a comfort break and a coffee on that kind of journey. And with the rate of charge that we focused on, so 10 to 80 per cent in 16 minutes, if you have a cup of coffee, have a comfort break, 15 minutes later, you’ve got another 400 kilometres in your car.
And when we talk about the end-to-end journey time as a result, that’s what we really focused on, the capability of the car for grand touring. And the end-to-end journey time becomes totally comparable with a conventional powertrain, and that’s really been the focus for us.
Is it easier to make a car charge faster than it is to make it go further on range?
I think there would be different challenges. The range is very centred around efficiency, of course, but then aero. And one of the fundamental things we wanted to make sure we did was deliver a product that looks like a Bentley.
Some brands have gone down the road of having a very aero-centric design philosophy. Our philosophy was really design a Bentley that looks like a Bentley, and then optimise it and make it as efficient as possible. So, at some point you have to make a decision on your priorities. And for us, the priority was the design authenticity rather than the full aero performance.
I’m really interested in what the Torcal will sound like and I’m excited listen to the Dynamic Symphony. Tell me more about it.
Yeah, so this is quite honestly my favourite part of the car. When we set out to do the car, we considered what Bentley’s EV journey might look like on a sound level. There’s an argument to say we could go silent; there’s some parts of the brand that would suit that. We’ve seen other brands go down a musical score, and we went through a considered approach to say, “Well, what’s our approach and what’s most authentic to the car?”
There’s a level of emotion that comes with an authentic powertrain propulsion sound. More fundamentally, we found that it was really important to understand the physics of the car. So as a driver, we’ve all got used to that subconscious feedback so that when you’re dipping in, when you’re on the limit, you know the stresses in the car. When it’s suddenly silent, it’s really hard to know what’s going on until you hear the tyres go. And even when it’s maybe musical, it’s not as intuitive as it is with the natural propulsion sound. So that set us on a path to say, “You know what? We want a propulsion sound in the car.”
We could have driven around and just recorded it and played it out of the speakers. We could have synthesised it, but the team came up with this proposal to use this kind of human artistry. We want everything in the car to be crafted, and that includes the digital spaces as well.
And you think about the iconic six-and-three-quarter-litre engine, it’s a very mechanical piece, but it’s got tolerances in it. It’s imperfect in every engine. And that’s what we found with musicians, experts in their field, artists in their craft, but they’re humans, right? They’re a little bit imperfect as well in some places, so it gives that natural kind of rhythm.
And when you hear it in the car, that is all you hear. And some people can’t quite connect. It’s so authentic. It can’t be drums. It’s got to be an engine. No, it’s not. It’s drums. It’s very, very authentic, as I say.
The way we deploy it is we link it to the torque demand in the motor. So, in a steady state of cruising, it drops to nearly zero. We can have a nice, easy conversation with our passengers, but as soon as you tip it, you get that buildup. We talk about resting beast in a design language sense, but you get that resting beast in a propulsive sense as well, and the vehicle wakes up and you get that real iconic thrum of a V8 played through these musicians on their drums. I get a lot of emotive connection to it because it’s such a great story and it’s such a great method of execution.
Who were these musicians?
We work with a range of industry experts from around the world. Actually, there was some time spent out in America with some experts. We’ve had a couple of individuals in the UK as well working with us.
But there are other cleverly curated noises in the car, too?
The indicator tick tock is actually a craftsperson with leather hammer. The “Hey Bentley” Global Assistant wake up sound is a finger on a crystal glass around the top of the rim. The warning tone has to be a slightly higher pitch scientifically, so we use a flute. We’ve used really authentic crafted sounds for every part of the soundscape in the car.
What is the audio system? And what are the seat shakers?
Naim audio is our top-level audio, it’s Dolby Atmos 7.1 capable as well. So clearly we have to have the right sound file in the car, and we’ve got some additional speakers in the car that give us some extra height that we’ve not been able to achieve before. Seat-based shakers are little modules underneath the seat that we can excite. So, as you have bass in the car, they excite the seats and you get that kind of feeling viscerally as well as audibly. Very subtle, but that’s certainly part of the experience.
Did you ever look at the technologies available to you and think, “Oh, we don’t want that. It’s just not very Bentley”?
I think if I start with the overall philosophy of technology for us, it’s always been around how do we use technology to enhance the experience and not dominate.
I’ll give you an example where we’ve chosen not to follow the technology trend – the passenger screen. You won’t find a passenger screen in the car. For us, the value proposition of having our traditional wood and carbon and metallic veneers is more valuable to our customers and, quite honestly, compared to a screen that does the same as the one in the middle. So, we’ve really been conscious about where we apply technology and not just follow every technological trend that exists.
So there are plenty of analogue controls in the car, too?
All of the high-touch points, we wanted to maintain as physical buttons. So your heating and ventilation controls, your volume, your ADAS system engagement. You can do a lot of these things while maintaining confidence and control over the vehicle.
Obviously, they’re all on the steering wheel as well, but there are a lot of haptic controls in the centre console area and that’s centred around what we call the Curation Controller.
What we’ve done is curated an entire environment. And again, in comfort mode, we get this kind of amber glow, warm fireside embers, the seat massage comes on, the sunroof clouds over and you get this very cocooned kind of impression. We’ve worked on that notion of a Michelin-style restaurant where we’ll curate the experience. In each of those modes, there’s a detox element, which allows you then of course to have the screen nice and simple, too.
Does that nod to the new type of Bentley customer with the blend of technology and materials?
For sure, we see this additional generation or additional demographic of customers being potentially slightly more technology-minded, but they also want the elements of luxury that traditionally defined luxury.
Of course, you can have all of the traditional trim and craft materials, but it’s underpinned by some very capable technology. And we’ve brought new trim to the car; we’ve got Merino wool in the car. We work closely with a company called Fox Brothers to develop that, the first 100 per cent Merino wool for automotive use – it’s a British company.
We’ve developed a new veneer, too, which again is all about using some of our heritage, but bringing it forward. This veneer is made from a thousand slices of our existing walnut veneers, some of which are offcuts from the wood we use in other products.
We then bonded them all together and they create this kind of guitar-fade veneer. And then we slice that off a millimetre thick and put that onto the substrate and that becomes your dash and your interior trim. So, it’s kind of modern takes on a traditional material – that’s what we’re trying to bring to the table as well.
How important the Britishness is for Bentley still and particularly around the Torcal, because ultimately, you are using a Volkswagen group platform?
I think that’s modern Bentley with all of our products – where we make use and we share and co-develop the basis of the cars with the Volkswagen Group as the capability in the Group is second to none. And the access to technology that it offers us, we talked about the chassis system earlier, is excellent.
That said, every single one of those components is uniquely calibrated for Bentley. So, although we share the hardware, the execution is always 100% unique and that is centred here in Crewe with the experts that understand Bentley’s DNA and Bentley’s background and what Bentley stands for.
If you come back to the Britishness, I think it’s really fundamental to what we stand for as a brand. There are many thousands of colleagues here in the factory who are super passionate about their expertise and what we can add into the car, whether that be paint, wood, leather or calibrating software for drivability and chassis performance. That expertise has been here and been built up over many decades. So, it’s really, really important for us to keep that and maintain the centricity to Crewe.
You’ve got a new paint shop, for example. Is this going to be the best-built Bentley ever?
I wouldn’t indicate that the others are not! But what we’re using and building is the very best of the latest technology. So, the paint shop is not only for Torcal – it’ll be used across the range and that brings really great capability for colour development. We’re using a lot of satins now, which is really, really fashionable and desirable for customers.
We’re making use of some different production methodologies in our Dream Factory here using Automated Guided Vehicles and different routes to the production line in terms of the way that parts come to the line. And that’s something that’s not only for Torcal – in due course I’m sure it will be part of the overall efficiency we want to put into the site and the overall capability that we are helping both colleagues and processes come into the 21st century.
How does Torcal shape the future of Bentley? They’re not all going to be all-electric immediately, but in terms of batteries, for example, does what you learned from the batteries, and the charging and the software around that, help your plug-in hybrid vehicles?
The main thing for me is when we go back to this luxury of choice. We are as a brand now able to offer this real spectrum of powertrain and body type opportunities, and we will see the performance of each of those products in each of their segments over time. And that will really inform where we want to focus, where we have to consider life cycles and things like that in each of those segments for each of those purposes.
The customer response and the customer feedback will inform Torcal’s lifecycle. And so far it’s been very positive and the proof will be in the pudding when we get cars out to customers in Quarter Two next year. We’ll use that feedback to guide our future direction.
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