You know what’s boring? Most luxury brands. They rest on their gilded laurels and labels. Why does a Louis Vuitton bag come covered in their logo? Because otherwise it would just be brown leather luggage. I get it: If you’re Bentley you’re bound by tradition and heritage and blah, blah. And look at the backlash Jaguar received when they painted outside the lines with their Type 00.
Luckily, Bentley didn’t look. Instead, they’ve dropped a very cool concept in the new EXP 15. Bentley stressed, several times, that this is only a concept. But within it, there are plenty of indications of a new Bentley design ethos that’s both daring and compelling.
Here’s the highlight reel takeaway.
Shaped For the Future—Via the Past
Bentley is stressing opposing forces with this design. They’re hewing to tradition, saying that this car is drawing inspiration from the famous 1930 Bentley Speed Six Gurney Nutting Sportsman, a record-setter in its day—95 years ago. Again, tradition matters to a brand like Bentley.
That car, like this concept, isn’t a sedan, but a coupe. What’s compelling in the modern guise is how Bentley is fusing the height of a car like the Bentayga, and that scale, with a fastback shape.
They stress that their cars have to be upright, which is simply about luxury. Folding yourself into a sports car is antithetical to what Bentley’s about.
At the front, at the grille, Bentley has cleverly used their diamond-embossed seating pattern as inspiration. Here, they pattern a shield at the front of the car, like a traditional grille, but instead it’s perforated, with LEDs behind it, shining through the diamond pattern.
EVs don’t need the same airflow as gas cars, but Bentleys definitely need ornaments, and this grille serves that job elegantly.
The “Flying B” logo is modernized, but somehow only to about 1960, in something like an homage to Boeing 707-era “jet-age” travel.
A Lounge on Wheels
This is a three-door car. With a hatchback. The idea is that you’d enter opposite the driver, and there is no front passenger seat. The driver is, likely, a chauffeur. The two rear passenger seats are definitely for lounging in luxury. Bentley envisions the space beside the driver as suitable for luggage, for your pets, or simply useful for your legs, in particular if you choose to take a nap.
In the hatch, there’s room for more luggage, and a pair of mini perches deploy from the split bottom of the tailgate. You can park yourself here for a picnic, or, one would guess, watching fox hunting or polo.
Probably, not tailgating American-style at an SEC college football game. But hey, it’s your Bentley! And besides, you have a chauffeur to roll you home, right?
Details Galore
Bentley, not so subtly, is making this concept a showcase of physical design. Yes, the dash cluster can flip over to display a screen, but Bentley design director Robin Page says, “We think people are going to get fed up with a fully digital experience and are pining for physical mechanical elements too.”
So this car is brimming with them. There are bejeweled, knurled, controls. There’s a massive lamp that looks straight off the set of the Gilded Age, and there’s a glowing orb at the center of the dash that’s meant to fuse the physical and the digital.
As Page explained, the idea is something like a complex mechanical timepiece that can also morph to function like a screen. But, also, would be visibily sculptural, the way, even in “pedestrian” cars of yore, a dashboard centerpiece was there simply because it was attractive to the eye.
Scant Details on Propulsion
Bentley has said they’ll have EVs on sale as soon as 2027, and they’ve said with the release of this concept, that they will reveal their first production EV next year. Is that this car? We very much doubt it. Too little feels unresolved about this concept, and typically when a carmaker wants to signal something could go into production, they don’t say, flatly, that the concept will never be sold. But some aspects of what they’ve indicated do signal that a car of these proportions makes perfect sense for a future Bentley. A car about the size of the Bentayga as either a racy coupe like this or a traditional EV SUV is very reasonable. We just bet that’s more like 2029 at the soonest.
TopSpeed’s Take
There’s something hopeful about several aspects of this car. Mostly, that’s in the physical elements. We, oddly, think of these as being luxurious, because the purely mechanical item, like a luxury timepiece, is an acceptable form of “showing off” for some men. The “everyday carry” is probably that for other people of, say, slightly lesser means.
But if Bentley designers know we’re tiring of screens, then other carmakers know it, too. And design influences design. So whether it comes from a Bentley or a Toyota or a Ford, really doesn’t matter. Innovation that wins, like this car’s clever grille, or its physical dials, can change how more mainstream cars are made. That’s cool, and that’s why we find this design clever and inspiring.
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