The man who brought the world the Porsche Cayenne, Wolfgang Dürheimer, is now chief executive at Bentley, and so it is fitting that his first proposed new product is a Bentley SUV. This has some of us wincing at the thought of a Continental nose being grafted onto a Cayenne body, as seen in some artists’ renderings that have surfaced recently. We’re told that won’t be the case, according to Brian Gush, Bentley’s lead engineer. “It will be different,” he said with a smile. Gush didn’t elaborate, though, so we used the Concours d’Elegance in Pebble Beach as an opportunity to press his boss for some more styling-related details on the proposed model. The brand’s first SUV is said to borrow heavily from other VW AG utilities (yes, including the Cayenne) under the skin, and is expected to come with a 12-cylinder engine. Here’s how Dürheimer describes the vehicle:
“From the front view, you will immediately identify it as a Bentley. It comes from the lights and the grille . . . quite vertical, with mesh. I think it’s absolutely important that if you approach the car, you see it’s a Bentley. From the back it will be the same, because nobody has the oval-shaped exhaust pipes that we have, and of course we will make it nice and neat in the back.
“The profile is the challenge. It will look like an SUV, but it will look sporty, dynamic, and will have some, let’s say, devices of pure identification so that if you’re sitting in a café or sitting out on the porch and the car goes by you immediately identify it is a Bentley. But I can’t tell you what [they are].”
All of this gives us some reassurance that the crossover will look rather more original than did the Cayenne. If nothing else, Bentley’s existing, upright form vocabulary is innately better matched to an SUV body than Porsche’s curvy, low-slung 911 styling was. If the model is approved, which is likely to happen by the end of this year, it could cost more than $200,000 and arrive by late 2014.
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