Bentley Confirms First EV For 2026 But Pushes Back EV-Only Goal By 5 Years

Bentley will reveal its first-ever EV in 2026, the firm revealed today as it announced the Beyond100+ electrification strategy that will take it to 2035 and beyond.

The British luxury brand, which currently only sells V6 and V8 vehicles following the death of the W12 engine this summer, described its maiden fully-electric model as the “first true Luxury Urban SUV,” claiming it will create an entirely new segment in the car market. But it also pushed back its plan to go electric-only from 2030 to 2035.

Related: Bentley Delays EV-Only Plans And Turns Focus To Hybrids

An accompanying silhouetted image of the EV shows the profile view of an SUV that looks broadly similar to today’s Bentayga but with a lower rear roofline, curvier fender shoulders, and a more pronounced flick at the base of the D-pillar. CEO Frank-Steffen Walliser told us at a press briefing the new car would be less than 5 m (197 inches) long, making it considerably smaller than the Bentayga, which measures 5.1 m (202 inches) in standard form and 5.3 m (210 inches) in stretched EWB guise.

Walliser claimed the EV would be more modern than its sister SUV and was targeting a new type of customer that might not have considered a Bentley before. He conceded that “to be honest, there’s not a lot of demand” for electric power from the brand’s traditional buyers but said there were plenty of other potential customers out there who would find the EV appealing. Walliser also described the current EV market slump as “a dip” and suggested interest in electric cars would bounce back.

Bentley didn’t give any further concrete details about the EV but did say its range would be “surprising” and suggested it had come up with a new way to generate a soundtrack that wasn’t synthetic, and was a technique no one else in the car industry was currently using. And it asserted that it would never offer electric and combustion versions of the same model.

Walliser also announced that we’d see a new BEV or PHEV every year between 2026 and 2035 when the firm will switch to making only fully-electric cars and SUVs. The automaker had previously committed to going EV-only in 2030 when it announced its original Beyond100 electrification plan in 2020. However, the new Beyond100+ program has been adapted to take account of the slowdown in the growth of the EV market.

“Everybody knows that the market looks different than was projected in 2019 – this is not Bentley-specific, it’s valid for the whole car industry” Walliser said. “So we had a look at the strategy, we kept with the plan to bring the first BEV in 2026 and have it in the market in 2027, but we also [changed] what we would do in the future with plug-in hybrids and ICE.”

High-end automakers have been hit particularly hard by the shift in demand for EVs. Bentley’s sister brand Porsche, where Walliser worked for two decades, has struggled to shift once-popular models like the Taycan, and recently revealed that it would be adapting future EVs currently in development to take hybrid power in response to market changes.

Bentley’s focus will also be on hybrid powertrains like the electrically-assisted V8 now fitted to the Flying Spur and Continental. But it also promised it would still launch new variants and “special models” with pure ICE engines, starting with a version of the Bentayga we’ll see next year.

The automaker’s first EV and other electrified models will all be developed at the Bentley’s historic Crewe base in the northwest of England, which is being overhauled with a new design center, paint shop, and BEV assembly line. But as with Bentley’s existing models, we can expect future cars and SUVs, including the new EV, to share platforms and components with other VW Group products.