Bentley gets back to business
Boss Adrian Hallmark on how Brit firm plans to recover
THIS was supposed to be the year that Bentley broke all records: record sales, record profitability and with a trajectory to go on to even greater things. Coronavirus meant all that came to a shuddering halt, yet Bentley has used its downtime effectively, becoming one of the first car makers in the UK to get back up and running with its Come Back Stronger plans.
On the day the first workers returned to Crewe, Bentley CEO Adrian Hallmark was in the car park welcoming his team back. Then he found some time to talk exclusively to Auto Express about how the crisis has affected his company, as well as his bold plans for Bentley’s future.
How have you been preparing for the return to work?
If you came into the factory now, it is fundamentally changed. So everything is one-way: corridors, walkways, you name it. We’ve isolated places in the rest areas where people eat. Microwaves have got screens around them, so you can’t see the person next to you, or they’re two metres apart. We’ve taken all of the build cells, identified where two people would normally work, and changed the process so that we take twice as long.
Who’s designed all the new working protocols?
We’ve done it all ourselves. We’ve taken all the public health guidelines, all the government guidelines, plus the restart protocols from all of the Chinese factories and the Italian factories. So we’ve got massive amounts of best practice. And then we’ve got our team to get really crazy, and we’ve done even more than any of the above. The other thing we’re doing is we’re bringing in a medical professional, starting next week, for a six-week period, to be our ombudsman.
What will production look like in the coming months?
We will start at 50 per cent. We’ve kept all the cars in sequence, and what we’ve now done is slowed the track down so we double the amount of time it takes to build the car. And that allows us to do it with fewer people in total, and fewer people in any given area at any given moment in time. So there will be no one under two metres apart.
How much has crisis cost you so far?
The actual cost of the reorganisation, the PPE and all those changes, is a few small millions. But closing down the factory costs $22million (£18m) a week. We’ve closed for seven weeks, so far, and then we’re going to run at a lower rate, for X number of weeks. So it’s cost us a record year that we were on track to achieve.
“we’ve taken all the public health guidelines, all the government guidelines, plus the restart protocols from all of the Chinese factories and the italian factories”
Adrain Hallmark
Bentley Ceo
“If you came into the factory now, it is fundamentally changed. So everything is one-way: corridors, walkways, you name it. We’ve isolated places in the rest areas where people eat”
ADRIAN HALLMARK
Bentley CEO
The last Bentley we saw before lockdown was the Bacalar – will we be seeing more Bentley specials and coachbuilding?
Mulliner’s been part of Bentley for more than 70 of its 100-year history. But if you fast-forward to now, it’s fair to say that we are being so focused on the core directives and core range, and rightly so, that we have completely missed the opportunity that we started.
I’m not going to jump in and get prolific and do loads of derivatives very fast and destroy the market; there are only so many customers that want this kind of product. But it’s enabled us to stretch our design thinking, reach out and build direct relationships with customers. Ultimately it will help us to create a halo of impacts for the brand on top of the great regular cars. So it makes perfect sense, but we’re not going to do one or two every year and overdo it. We’ll do it when we feel that the time is right. We’ll do it when we get the product and the customer proposition right, and we’ll work with customers to come up with the next ideas as well. And we’ll have a bit of fun at the same time.
What about continuation models? You’ve had some criticism from owners about the Blower.
The motivation to do it is certainly not to be revolutionary or to offend anybody. The first point I would say, we’re not going to recreate every car that we ever made. So will we do another continuation that we offer to a handful of customers? Maybe. But the top priority to me is to build the DNA lineage of the brand and doing one or two of these, like the Blower recreations, does allow us to do that, partly finance it and give a whole bunch of customers the chance to have the same experience that we’re going to have with the doppelgänger.
And I will say, final comment, that at least two of our 12 customers own original Blowers, and they want one of these so they can tool around in it and protect the value of their car, exactly the way we wanted to do with the first engineered car.
Is there a future for luxury sedans such as the Flying Spur and Mulsanne?
Well, the Mulsanne, no, we’re ceasing production of that. They [sedans] have served a specific purpose for decades, and that purpose has now subsided. Now people love big powerful SUVs and coupés and other products.
We’re not planning a big stately saloon car to replace the Mulsanne, but I think Flying Spur is a different kettle of fish. That has got far more utility than just being a stately sedan. It’s a high-performance car too, in relative terms.
As for a flagship, that’s usually driven by price, isn’t it? That’s Bacalar, isn’t it? In terms of where we take the core range, we definitely want to crank more derivatives of all the products that we currently have, and more valuable ones too. I wouldn’t yet want to say that an SUV or a sedan or a crossover will be the flagship. We just need ever-more interesting, innovative and customer-relevant cars, beyond what we currently do. We’ve got some great ideas.
How are plans for electrification coming along?
In the early 2030s, the plan is that everything will be electrified. Between now and the early 30s is a long time, so hybridisation we’re fully committed to. So you’ll see more hybrids, more derivatives, more collectables, but not just the coachbuilt ones. And we’ll definitely push each of our name plates. We’ll push the boundaries building technology and customer appeal, and we won’t walk away fully from the Mulsanne price point.
Do electric SUVs work?
There’s a time-based answer to this question. If you took a Bentayga today, took the engine out, and filled it with batteries, it would be so heavy that it wouldn’t go anywhere. So the theoretical range, you hit this diminishing return, you need to put so many batteries to get it through the air, that the batteries themselves would kill the range of the batteries.
It’s going to take five to 10 years, we think, before you get a breakthrough. Smaller cars with less range, you can do sooner. There’s a sweet spot for every size of car according to the battery power density. So what we’ve worked on is what’s the best we can do on plug-in hybrids in which period of time. So we’ve got that plan. And then which cars could we electrify first, and how to get the best possible combination. And it would have to be low cars before high cars to become electric.