The new Bentley Torcal

The Torcal is an SUV and that’s been known for ages. What’s not been known until now is whether its appearance would induce heart-failure among Bentley traditionalists and be trolled forever after on Instagram, the for now apparent fate of another first stab at an EV from a blue-blooded manufacturer located outside Modena. They can relax: while looks are always entirely subjective judgements and I always hesitate before proclaiming on them, because my view is no more qualified than that of anyone else, if the Torcal’s styling brings anything like that hailstorm of opprobrium rattling off the roofs of Crewe, I’ll eat my sketchbook.

One of the most revealing comments of the entire event came when Bentley boss Frank-Steffen Walliser confided in me, ‘if we’d done this car 10 years ago it would have been a lot more fancy,’ which you can read as ‘outré’. I’m glad it’s not because, call it wacky, out there or merely avant-garde, these are not the first qualities someone considering buying a Bentley would likely be looking for. As the EV market has matured it’s become clear that the mental jump from petrol to electrical power is more than enough for the customer to get his or her head around without being forced also to swallow not merely a new design language, but an entire design philosophy bearing no resemblance to and having nothing in common with anything the marque has been producing for more than a century.

There will be some who say it looks like a Chinese concept car, but find me an all-new luxury car with no predecessor that has not attracted that particular comment, so it can be discounted. The word than kept coming back to me as I roamed around the studio is ‘handsome’. The Torcal is not stunning, gorgeous and certainly not pretty; it is handsome. Understated; well proportioned; easy on the eye; a design where the back of the car looks like it was done by the same people who did the front, which is far from a given these days. Handsome, in other words.

Something else. It looks like a Bentley too, which was also not a given because what is notably different about the Torcal is that the headlight treatment, with quad lamps and the inners always being larger than those on their flanks that has been perhaps the most recognisable feature of all Bentleys since the launch of the Continental GT in 2003, has been abandoned. And I won’t miss it at all: it was done as nod to vintage-era Bentleys which had massive Lucas P100 headlights and tiny sidelights mounted on their wings. But what worked in the 1920s just seemed odd and out of place in the 21st century, at least to me.

The Torcal is notably lower than the Bentayga but still firmly in SUV rather than crossover territory, with a gently sloping roof leading down to a pleasingly rendered tail with a noticeable bustle. I’m not surprised that’s the part of the car Bentley chose to lead with in the one and only photograph so far released, because it is the car’s most elegant aspect, not that any of the rest of it is in any way bad. It has powerful haunches, as all good Bentleys must, small side gills and relatively short overhangs, providing a solid wheel at each corner stance. It also has power bulges in the bonnet, not because there’s some monstrous regiment of twin-choke downdraft carburettors needing the clearance – which is where they originate from – but because Bentley thinks they looked cool on the Batur and will do so again here. It’s not wrong.

But if criticism is heading its way, I’ve a pretty shrewd idea of what the aiming point is likely to be. Naturally the Torcal doesn’t need a massive, vertical grille at the front, because there is no radiator behind it in need of cooling air. But the car still has one and the reason it’s there, I am sure, is part of Bentley’s surely correct conviction that EV power is enough of a departure all by itself without giving prospects so enormous a visual change to absorb too. So what the design team has done has made a feature out of it instead, with rows of illuminated diamond-shaped ‘crystals’ which can perform various different displays depending on whether you’re firing it up, shutting it down and so on. And the very good news for all those who might regard such son et lumière effects as perhaps a little too recherché, you can turn them all off too and just have their quite attractive outlines remaining.

However, these are clearly quite sensitive components which are unlikely to react well to being pelted with a lifetime’s worth of road debris, so Bentley has put them behind a transparent polycarbonate wall made from the same material as that which clothes the headlights. All very sensible you might think, but it does mean that as you approach the car, one of the very first things you notice is what appears to be a vast slab of plastic which some might understandably consider to be not very Bentley at all.

But no question the grille, whether you think it works or not, does give the Torcal the presence of a Bentley. Indeed it looks just as imposing (not to mention considerably more attractive) as a Bentayga, despite being smaller in every significant external dimension, but most notably in its height and its length.

Even so, while there wasn’t a Bentayga on hand to make a direct comparison, I’d say the interior space was at least as good, possibly better in the back unless you’re comparing to an extended wheelbase Bentayga. Certainly I could sit behind my 6ft 3in self with no problem at all and go all the way to Scotland with space to spare, so long as the battery lasted that long. Of which more in a minute.

It also benefits from a brand new and long overdue interior though the architectural philosophy, of two ‘wings’ extending left and right from a cascading central dash remains. It was pioneered on the 2003 Continental GT as a subtle cap doff to the Bentley wings and it works as well today as it did then. And while we’re on the subject of wings, this is the first Bentley that will carry the revised ‘Flying B’ logo. It’s a lot simpler which is usually to my taste, but actually I prefer the old one which, to me at least, was in no need of updating.

Then again, the Torcal is aimed at a wider constituency of punter than perhaps any previous Bentley. Nevertheless the company is keen to stress it’s not particularly targeting a younger audience, just widening the field somewhat, though it is expected that this will naturally bring down the average age of the buyer. Nor is Bentley expecting vast volumes, at least at the outset: it is expected to outsell the Flying Spur, shift in similar quantities to the Continental GT and stay somewhat shy of Bentayga numbers. But that is likely to change over time as more models are released on the same platform – there’s no way Bentley would go to such efforts for just one car – and as acceptance of EVs increases in the big wide world.

In performance terms there are no details I can share as yet, but what I can tell you and which is far more significant than any mere number is that the Torcal is not going to be joining the fast expanding club of EVs where 1000bhp is what you need just to get through the door. The top brass has recognised this for the pointless arms race it is so clearly is, which does nothing more than add weight to an already extremely hefty car to provide a level of performance no one’s going to use for any purpose other than to make their passengers feel sick. Bentley has thought hard about the nature of ‘enough’ in this context, and having seen the numbers I can confirm the Torcal will provide all the performance and probably a touch more than any Bentley owner is likely ever even to want, let alone need. In other words it will be exceptionally rather than stupidly rapid.

As for range, Bentley says it will be ‘over 300 miles’ and I think we can take that to mean ‘real miles’ rather than laboratory-generated fantasy miles, and it’s no secret that underneath lies the VW Group PPE (Premium Platform Electric) structure, so 800-volt architecture and very fast charging is guaranteed. So it’s likely to be competitive in these regards, but probably not much more than that.

And that’s about it for now. Of course the big question regardless of how capable and good-looking the Torcal may prove to be, is whether the market is even ready for an EV from a pure luxury brand, SUV or otherwise. It will sit at the entry point to the Bentley range, my guess being (and it is a guess) that it’ll undercut the Bentayga but not by much, so I’d expect a base spec car to cost around £160,000. And there’s not much competition in that space right now: a Rolls-Royce Spectre will likely be twice as much so cannot be considered a rival.

There are top end versions of the Mercedes EQS SUV to consider and the Porsche Cayenne Electric too, though Bentley would doubtless say these are mere premium brand manufacturers bought by different people for different reasons. Bentley may be worried that the Lotus Eletre and Emeya have not exactly set the world on fire, but there are good reasons – lack of brand relevance, previous presence in the category and their Chinese origins – to suspect other issues may lie behind that. And you can bet every tooth in your head it will be sold as a Bentley through and through, designed, engineered and built in Crewe as it will be, that just happens to be electric.

In fact I think the Torcal’s most interesting opponents are homegrown, but yet to push out of the starting blocks, namely the Jaguar Type 01 and Range Rover Electric. Is there a meaningful market for all or any of these cars, and will one emerge during their lifetimes to justify their massive upfront investment costs? If I knew the answer to that I’d not be writing these words now but deciding instead whether I wanted to take the F1 or the F40 to the pub.