How Bentley and Rolls-Royce Are Responding to Shifts in the EV Market
When Bentley launched its Beyond 100 strategy in 2020, the venerable British marque examined the global regulatory and consumer environment, factored in projections for growth in required infrastructure, and decided it would become a fully electric-car company by 2030. Then something unforeseen happened: Public adoption, government incentives, and charging-network development all slowed, so Bentley had to slacken the pace of its transition, too. It has now published a Beyond 100+ revision, pushing this deadline forward at least five years.
Such a shift invokes concomitant issues, ones that Bentley is not alone in facing. Automakers typically design models for seven-year life cycles, at a usual cost of about $1 billion. When a manufacturer opts to cease producing gas-powered vehicles, it stops envisioning and investing in future internal-combustion-engined replacements. But if timelines and demands change, as they appear to have here, the marque suddenly lacks product and must somehow fill the void.
Bentley plans to accomplish this by “extending the life cycle” of its current gas-powered roster and is lucky enough to be supported by its particular market position. Because consumers who spend mid-six figures on a car don’t want it to appear obsolete once subsequent models are unveiled, design changes in this segment are usually both gradual and subtle. Thus, while Bentley’s Continental GT, for example, has been around for 21 years, only well-trained eyes can distinguish its four generations.
This is less true for other luxury carmakers, such as Mercedes-Benz. In 2021, Mercedes asserted that it would “unzip” its product portfolio as it moved completely to battery power, creating fully separate lineups of hybrids and pure EVs for one seven-year generation, before “zipping” them back into EV-only offerings. But the apparent stall in the mass adoption of electrification has fouled this plan, and Mercedes has walked back its steps in that regard.
“Flexibility is the name of the game at this point,” says Bart Herring, vice president of sales and product management for Mercedes-Benz USA. According to Herring, the brand is open to extending the tenure of its current gas-powered models as a stopgap in its delayed migration to a fully electrified lineup.
Rolls-Royce, while still preparing for a transition to EVs, is also pragmatic in its approach. “Our strategy continues to be that if the market, and our customers particularly, want to go fully electric by the end of the decade, we will be capable,” stated Martin Fritsches as president and CEO of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Americas (he has since been promoted within the BMW Group). “It doesn’t mean that, ultimately, we’re going to go there. We still have five years, and the U.S. [market] is very dynamic and changes very quickly, so a lot can happen in between.”
Fortunately, today’s software-heavy vehicles can be readily revamped with new features, apps, safety and driver-assistance systems, and efficiencies—all through over-the-air updates via Wi-Fi. “Now you have this ability to bring newness to a vehicle,” says Herring. “You can think about extending the life cycle of a vehicle’s architecture one to three years.”
But automakers are still gambling that a projected interim margin of three to five years will suffice for lengthening the range of their existing internal-combustion cars. According to Herring, beyond that, “it just comes down to who has the least-cloudy crystal ball.”
