Bentley’s First EV Charges to 80 Percent in 16 Minutes. It Also Pipes In Fake Engine Noise.

A lot of what you paid for in a Bentley was sound. The big engine clearing its throat outside a restaurant did real work for the sticker price. The Torcal, Bentley's first electric car, revealed in London today, has none of that. So Bentley composed some and named it Bentley Dynamic Symphony.

The car under the soundtrack is serious. It's a five-meter SUV, designed, engineered and built in Crewe, with two permanent magnet motors driving all four wheels. That's 821 PS in the standard car and 888 in the S, good for 0 to 60 mph in 3.3 seconds, or 2.8 if you buy the S. Top speed is 155 mph, or 162 in the S. Those are the numbers Bentley led with. The one it left out is the price.

Sixteen minutes to 80 percent

The battery is 113 kWh net, running on an 800-volt architecture. Find a fast enough charger and the Torcal will pull up to 400 kW, which takes it from 10 to 80 percent in roughly 16 minutes. That's long enough for a coffee and a bathroom stop. Bentley quotes up to 375 miles on the WLTP cycle (600 km), so most owners won't be doing it often anyway.

The chassis is the other genuinely good part. This is the first Bentley with fully active suspension, and it gets all-wheel steering with an 11.1 meter turning circle. A five-meter SUV that turns around in 11.1 meters is a car that stops being frightening in a multi-story car park. Day to day, that's worth more than 888 PS will ever be.

What a Bentley is for once the engine is gone

Which brings us back to the Dynamic Symphony. Synthetic sound in an electric car isn't new, and the reasoning holds up, since you really do use engine noise to judge how fast you're going. It's still an admission. If the roar was part of what justified the badge, and the roar is now a software feature, what are you paying for?

Bentley's answer, as far as the spec sheet goes, is quiet craft. Silence was always the more expensive luxury. An electric powertrain hands you that for nothing, which leaves Bentley competing on the ride, the materials, and the way the doors close. Those are the things it was better at than most people gave it credit for.

The cabin

There are curved OLED screens and an augmented reality head-up display, both of which are becoming table stakes at this end of the market. I'd want to see the AR display at night, in the rain, before saying anything nice about it.

The wool is the more interesting choice. Bentley has gone with 100 percent Merino wool fabric for the interior, a real departure from the acres of leather this class defaults to. All four doors open themselves, under power, which is the kind of feature that delights for a month and turns up on a service bill in year eight. Cargo is 460 liters in the trunk plus a 90 liter frunk, so the weekend luggage fits and the odds and ends go up front.

Bentley still hasn't said what it costs

There's no price and no delivery date. Bentley detailed the wool, the wheelbase, the charging curve and the 10 year / 100,000 mile battery warranty, and then stopped short of the two things you'd need to act on. If you're actually considering one, you know everything except whether you can afford it and when it would show up.

Bentley is late to this, by any measure. What it brought is good: a 16-minute charge, active suspension, and a five-meter SUV that turns around in a parking space, all of it engineered in Crewe on a first attempt. Until there's a price and a date, the Torcal is a very good car nobody can buy.