News

Bentley has revealed a dramatic, high-riding limousine concept that previews the design of its upcoming cars – and it could evolve into a successor to the Mulsanne flagship.

Called the EXP 15, this 5.4m-long show car will inspire the shape and styling of the next generation of Bentley cars, beginning with its first EV, an ‘urban SUV’, which will be launched next year to sit underneath the Bentayga.

Straddling the boundaries between saloon, SUV and grand tourer, the EXP 15 takes design inspiration from some of Bentley’s best-known historic models but ushers in a futuristic new treatment that departs radically from the current Continental GT, Flying Spur and Bentayga.

It’s a statement of intent from recently appointed director of design Robin Page, who rejoined Bentley from Volvo in 2023, having previously served in Crewe’s interior design team for 17 years.

He told Autocar that his aim with the EXP 15 is to drastically evolve the company’s design hallmarks while remaining true to its most recognisable elements.

“It’s still in that linear line of Bentleys, but it’s a fresh start – a new design language,” said Page. “The point is to make a bit of a bang: next chapter.”

“It’s also given us a chance to try a new, modern design language – more monolithic, stronger and cleaner in its surfaces and not too over-complicated,” he continued, giving clues to the styling of Bentley’s initial wave of electric cars.

Bentley's new look

The primary aim of the new concept is to showcase five overarching design themes that will define the next-generation Bentley line-up – all five of which are inspired by one of the earliest Bentley GT cars: the 1928 Speed Six with bodywork by coachbuilder Gurney Nutting.

Better known today as the Bentley ‘Blue Train’ for its association with original ‘Bentley Boy’ Woolf Barnato, who won a race against the legendary ‘Train Bleu’ express from Cannes to London in 1930 with a Speed Six, that car showcases various definitive styling cues that Page has reinterpreted for the modern era.

First is the “upright elegance” of its front end, which is referenced in the new concept’s bluff, imposing face – a departure from the more angled visages of Bentley’s current cars.

Page said: “We started to lean things back, but what we see from the heritage cars is this strong vertical element and that gives it that kind of proud confidence that we want to capture on the front of our cars. What we’ve been relating it to is a horse. If you think of a thoroughbred horse coming to a stop, it has that upright, vertical chest.”

The more upright, monolithic face is at odds with the low-slung and heavily sculpted front ends that other firms are applying to their electric cars in pursuit of enhanced efficiency. But Page said Bentley is not out to claim any range records with its electric cars.

“We’re finding that there’s a sweet spot in terms of range. Our customers are basically telling us that 300-350 miles is that sweet spot. Beyond that, they’ll use the private jet,” he said.

The “endless bonnet line” is a key feature, too, and Page points to the slim, distinctively shaped daylight opening as one of the more obvious parallels between the old and new cars.

Meanwhile, the new-look rear end, with a prominent new light signature inspired by the firm’s ‘B’ emblem, is described as the “prestigious shield” and modelled on the rear luggage carriers affixed to Bentleys of old.

The fifth design theme common to future Bentley models will be the “resting beast” proportions showcased by the EXP 15 – with a long bonnet (here housing a sizeable frunk with a pair of 1930s-style, piano-hinged lids), a cab-rear silhouette and heavily accentuated rear arches.

“We relate this to a tiger having a strong shoulder when it’s laid down,” said Page. “It’s got power in the back legs.”

Although the EXP 15 is a dramatic departure from the current conventions of Bentley design, its creators have preserved some of the firm’s most important and recognisable features.

Page cites the grille-inspired front lighting design as a prime example: “We decided to keep the grille as being our main communication. In the past, the grille was all about getting air into the car. We don’t need that any more, so we created a piece of art.

The concept’s front end is dominated by a large section of cutaway diamond motifs, with a ‘crystal’-themed LED light display behind, giving a dynamic effect that changes according to the angle they are viewed from. The EXP 15 also swaps from a traditional circular headlight design to a slimline vertical arrangement that references the chrome strips on the wings of the old Speed Six.

Page said round headlights are effectively a hangover from a time when lighting technology wouldn’t allow for other shapes. “What we find is every time we did round lights, you get the retro signal. We just want to test the water to see how passionate people are about round lights,” he said.

Page has sought to avoid an overtly retro-inspired design, despite taking influence from Bentley’s past. “As soon as you start to duplicate,” he said, “you fall into the retro trap.”

He added: “What we’re getting from our customers and dealers is that we need to be more modern and progressive. We love the old cars, but at the end of the day we want to be the coolest kid on the block.”

EXP 15's first-class cabin

Uniquely for a full-sized luxury car, the EXP 15 features a three-seat layout, with the nearside passenger seat sliding fore and aft electrically on demand, and rotating 90deg when the doors open for a more elegant exit – an arrangement that harks back to the cockpit of Barnato’s famous continental cruiser.

“Barnato was a playful character: he liked to drive himself, but sometimes he wanted to have a whisky in the back. And he also had his girlfriend with him, and sometimes she would sit in the back. It was a very self-indulgent car,” said Page.

The concept also has picnic seats and a champagne cooler in the tailgate, a reverse-opening rear door on the passenger side and a central section of the roof that opens when parked so passengers can stand before getting out. Bentley has even designed a bespoke dog carrier that mounts in the passenger footwell.

“What we’re finding is that people love this idea of real luxury,” said Page, “and the dog is now a very important accessory.”

He said the aim with the EXP 15’s cabin is to ensure VIP passengers have the most dramatic entrance possible upon arrival at a prestigious destination.

“The idea is that the most important person sits in the rear, and when they arrive at an occasion, the two doors open, the seat twists around, the roof goes back and you get ‘the art of arriving’. That is the Instagram photo shot – someone arriving in style and that’s what we wanted to capture,” said Page.

Traditionally, outlandish features such as these remain the preserve of concept cars as designs progress through to production, but Page said “we’ve based it all around a viable package” in order to “gauge whether this is an interesting concept”.

Meanwhile, in the centre of the dashboard, where a large touchscreen is usually mounted, there is a prominent physical dial to control various in-car functions, with a small digital display housed within it that can show the state of charge or directional arrows for the sat-nav, among other functions.

“It’s like having a mechanical watch and a digital watch,” said Page, adding that Bentley is exploring new dashboard formats that aren’t centred around a traditional touchscreen, and emphasising its focus on analogue controls, which feature throughout the cockpit of the EXP 15.

“What we’re finding, especially at our end of the market, is that people are a bit bored with full-digital screens. What makes us premium is to keep a good level of mechanical detailing that the others can’t do,” said Page.

Will Bentley build it?

The EXP 15 was conceived first and foremost as a design showcase, but Page suggested that a positive reception to its genre-bending silhouette would strengthen the likelihood of a production version.

Asked if the EXP 15 could be readied for showrooms, he said: “It’s doable.”

The concept has been designed around “a viable package and platform, and these are mechanisms that exist. What we want to do is gauge whether this is an interesting concept,” said Page.

He stopped short of saying whether the EXP 15 had been conceived around a specifi c architecture, but a variation of the SSP ‘Sport’ platform that sibling company Porsche is using for its new upcoming SUV flagship, the K1 – a large, three-row SUV that will sit above the Cayenne – would be a logical fit for a production version.

If it does make showrooms, the EXP 15 would not replace any current model, but rather it would pick up where the Mulsanne limousine left off when it was retired in 2020 after a 10-year run – once again giving the Crewe firm a direct rival to the Rolls-Royce Phantom.

Before giving the green light, though, Bentley will closely monitor reaction to the EXP 15 concept in order to gauge the viability of offering a high-riding saloon in this vein.

Page said: “We know really well the GT market. We pretty much invented that market. That’s solid. We know our customers. We know what we want to do. Even in the luxury SUV market, we’re now pretty experienced.

“The one we’re curious about is the sedan… We’ve got a very successful Flying Spur. The question is: do we continue with that kind of proportioned car, or do we elevate it a bit more?”

There are no plans to dramatically reinvent the Continental GT (“people love it for that really amazing driving experience”) or the Bentayga (“its capability as an SUV is incredible”) in this vein. But Page said the market for luxury saloons is changing and the EXP 15’s unique shape could be the key to renewed success in that market.

“What we’re exploring here is: there is the traditional sedan, but is there something else out there?” he said. “People are starting all the time to want a more elevated seating position, and if you look at the trends, the SUV is constantly, always growing, and the sedan one is steady. So we’re just exploring if that’s an area that we’ve not tapped into.”

Q&A: Robin Page, director of design, Bentley

Have Chinese customers driven your focus on rear-seat comfort?

“We’re very successful with sedans in China – they love Flying Spur – so that’s definitely one area to connect with. The other thing is that our customers are changing. Even in the US, what’s important to them is how they arrive at the destination. This art of arrival is something that’s key at the premium level. They go to very exclusive events in order to arrive and be seen.”

So is there less of a focus on driver engagement?

“The 3 Litre is a car Woolf Barnato drove himself, but there was a need for him to have a drink in the back and a sideways seat. And that’s typical of our customers: they will drive the cars themselves. That’s the difference. Our customers love to drive, but there are occasions where they either want to impress someone and hence give them a really nice experience, or they want to arrive themselves at an event and be chauffeured – so it needs to do both.”

How will you balance physical and digital controls?

“For us, it’s a blend of the two together. We want people to be delighted by the physical and hidden details. But we still can’t just take out digital experiences, because they’re so amazing in terms of content and animations. You want to scroll through your music selection. You want to have the latest navigation system… And that’s a digital experience. But what we do is combine these two.”

Bentley has unveiled the EXP 15, a new concept that provides a scintillating first look at its new era. A high-riding limousine, it actually takes inspiration from the 'Blue Train', a special driven by Bentley Boy Woolf Barnato in the 1930s.

In this feature from 2014, Steve Cropley visits some of Barnato's favourite haunts in the Blue Train. This is what it feels like to thread it through London's side streets...

The Bentley Boys are back in town

The point of owning a special car, owners say, is that you can use it to do special things. However, for Woolf Barnato, 35-year-old double Le Mans winner and owner of Bentley Motors in the spring of 1930, the usual order of things was reversed: he had an activity in mind but needed the car. What he did about that created, over the next 84 years, the curious tale of the Bentley Blue Train.

Barnato had inherited his father’s South African diamond mining fortune and was a prominent member of London’s car-mad social scene. The task he set himself had already been well publicised. Both a Rover and an Alvis had recently raced and beaten the famous Blue Train, the French express known for assisting England’s wealthy to ‘winter’ on the French Riviera. However, each had merely beaten the train by minutes, and from the bar of the Hotel Carlton in Cannes, Barnato decided a Bentley could do much better. He bet £100 that he could leave with the Blue Train and be parked outside his London club by the time it reached Calais. On 13 March, with his friend Dale Bourne riding shotgun, he set off just before 6pm in his Bentley Speed Six to prove it.

Near Lyons the pair was slowed by heavy rain. At Auxerre they lost time searching for a fuelling point. Further north they encountered dense fog and burst a tyre, but they still made the Boulogne cross-channel ferry at 10.30am and reached London in the early afternoon, parking outside the Conservative Club in St James’s Street four minutes before the Blue Train steamed into Calais station at 3.54pm. Barnato collected his £100 but was fined considerably more by furious French authorities for racing on public roads. And in a fascinating link between law enforcement and commerce, the French organisers also managed to prevent Bentley from exhibiting cars at the Paris Salon later that year – but nothing could affect the fame of the legendary ‘Blue Train’ Bentley.

For decades it was presumed that Barnato’s Cannes-London Bentley was the magnificent Gurney Nutting-bodied Speed Six Sportsman’s Coupé you see here, owned by Bruce and Jolene McCaw of Washington and imported temporarily to the UK last year for various anniversaries and re-enactments. As late as 2005, the coupé was still being portrayed as the authentic record-breaker, though by then doubts had surfaced.

New research by the owner revealed the truth: Barnato had raced across France in an HJ Mulliner-bodied Speed Six saloon. His notes had referred clearly to a saloon that carried fuel cans in its boot – and the coupé didn’t have one. In fact, Barnato had taken delivery of the Gurney Nutting two-door two weeks later and christened it, in all innocence, the Blue Train Special in honour of his achievement.

All this the McCaws established beyond doubt. Then, to complete the job, they found, bought and restored the original Speed Six saloon. Nothing, however, could detract from the Gurney Nutting coupé’s value (£6 million and counting) or unique appeal – which is why we came to be driving it by kind permission of the indulgent owners through London’s pitiless traffic.

Our plan was to do a Barnato heritage tour of London, starting at the famous Jack Barclay dealership in Berkeley Square (the world’s largest and oldest Bentley emporium) and visiting four of the great man’s haunts before arriving at the famous Savoy Hotel, where Barnato and his Bentley Boy friends were regulars. Their fame was such that, to this day, the Savoy’s skilled bar staff can still reach into their famed recipe book and mix you a Woolf Barnato cocktail.

It was spitting when we assembled at 9am, but the dullness outside only served to make the Blue Train Special gleam more brightly under Jack Barclay’s showroom lights. The Gurney Nutting coupé is shorter and lower than the regulation sixcylinder 6½ Litre from which it is derived, but it still dwarfed the longest modern in the showroom, with its immense wire wheels and a roof line, despite being ‘chopped’ in modern parlance, well above my head. Imposing is the word. Roughly a third of 6½ Litres were Speed Sixes – hotter because of their higher compression ratios, twin SU carburettors and performance camshafts. They were rated at 180bhp at 3500rpm, compared with 147bhp for the standard 6½. The successful racing versions went well beyond 200bhp.

Against a modern straight six, this is not a smooth engine, but then you’ll be pushed to find a modern six so big. The enormity of its rotating masses (capacity is 6597cc, or well over a litre per cylinder) and the ultra-long stroke of 140mm, compared with the 100mm bore, give it a healthy rumble. 

It’s extremely torquey, though – one of those engines that seems to develop 100lb ft of torque when merely idling, which it can do very slowly if you set the timing and mixture using the elegant steering wheel levers. Our driver, Richard Charlesworth (whose official position as Bentley’s director of royal and VIP relations meant he wouldn’t be doing much rabbiting about his day job), is perhaps the firm’s foremost expert at driving cars of the ‘WO’ era, and he took the wheel.

We headed first for Grosvenor Square, half a mile away, where Barnato’s elegant home at No 50 stands at the south-eastern corner, farthest from the looming US Embassy that occupies the western end 400 metres away. In front of the house there’s an inviting-looking parking apron known in period as Bentley’s Corner, and we were worried as we bumped the mighty car over kerbs on to what today is most definitely a footpath, expecting at any second platoons of machine gun-toting security men to arrive, wanting to know our intentions and political leanings.

No one came. No one, that is, except for curious tourists by the dozen. It went to prove what any vintage car owner will tell you: the general public is interested in and entirely unthreatened by old cars and has an instinctive liking for their antiquity. While they swirled, we took a minute to savour the elegance of the surroundings before heading back into the traffic, peering through the slit screen, over the louvred bonnet, past the dinner-plate headlights and on to the road.

Driving a car like this in London is something you’d never manage if you hadn’t established familiarity with it in easier-going traffic. First, there’s the ultra-heavy, unassisted steering and 45ft (my estimate) turning circle to contend with. If you only ever drive moderns, you forget what a huge part of driving time is taken up with clutch and transmission management. Sure, the engine is huge and flexible, but any gearchange, up or down, requires a time-consuming double shuffle (one-pause-clutch-clunk-two) that simply can’t be banged through, no matter how many white vans are snapping at your rear. Same for the brakes. They’re powerful, but the car’s a three-tonner. Start slowing before you have to, that’s the rule.

Yet it’s comfortable. Not exactly spacious, but it has those enveloping bucket seats of the early days of motoring and room enough to stick your legs more or less straight out in front. Despite the lack of independent suspension at either end, the Bentley’s weight simply mashes most bumps into submission, and with such a vast wheelbase, fully a metre longer than some family cars, the big beast simply never pitches.

We hunted for a while before finding our next landmark, the old Gurney Nutting coachbuilding shop in Elystan Street, behind the King’s Road, where the Blue Train coupé’s special body was reputedly built. 

At first we saw only blocks of f lats, but suddenly there it was, small, perfectly placed and venerable enough to be a coachbuilder’s shop. Our hearts leapt. Then it was back through Berkeley Square again – past the Morton’s Club greatly favoured by Barnato and his chums – and into St James’s Street, where we parked outside the old Conservative Club. Again, the confidence of the old-car owner came to the fore; we must have stood there for 15 minutes, funnelling taxis and tourist buses from two lanes into one while various snappers (moving and still) did their stuff. We were never hassled.

We’d travelled five or six miles in as many hours, so it was well into the afternoon by the time we turned from The Strand into the unique entrance of The Savoy, greeted instantly by the topper-toting miracle men who have the impossible job of controlling the congested forecourts of places such as this, yet accomplish it for years on end and nearly always with a smile.

They squeezed both our Gurney Nutting coupé and our snappers’ Mulsanne saloon (which looked rather well beside it) into a specially cleared corner, clucking over the Blue Train as if it were one of the greatest cars in the world and not minding that we deposited some rather horrible coolant on their immaculate floor. It is one of the world’s greatest cars, of course, but these are men for whom the most lurid Bugatti Veyron is merely four wheels and an engine.

In the Cocktail Bar – thronged, incredibly, by people who looked perfectly comfortable there – the head barman produced the venerable Savoy Cocktail Book (which has lived behind the same bar since the ’30s) and opened it at the right page. We could have had The Bentley or The Woolf Barnato but, after discussion, opted for the former, consisting of half-and-half Dubonnet and extremely upmarket calvados. I’d like to say it was delicious, but the truth is it was an acquired taste and none of us was ever likely to have the time or money to put the work in. Still, it seemed to go perfectly with the quality and grandeur of the two cars outside, new and old, and I’m pretty confident Woolf Barnato would have thought so, too.