Bentley EXP 100’s designers reveal early inspirations
As Bentley celebrated its 100-year anniversary on July 10th 2019 with a stunning concept car unveil at its Crewe, UK HQ, Car Design News was there to talk to its key designers
“This is more than just a styling exercise, it’s actually a company brand manifesto,” Brett Boydell, head of Bentley interior design told Car Design News at the global reveal of the EXP 100 made to crown a century of the luxury British motoring marque’s history.
The 5.8-metre long, 2.4-metre wide GT offers two-to-four seats, depending on configuration, and reimagines a Grand Tourer in circa 2035 as an emission-free electric vehicle with in-wheel motors, optional autonomy, and ethical luxury as standard (including upcycled ancient wood within the cabin).
Exterior inspiration came from many areas of Bentley’s back catalogue. “With our heritage, you’ve got a large bandwidth to reference,” John Paul Gregory, head of exterior design explained to CDN on the sidelines of the unveil. “We’ve got quite strong, blocky and in some ways straightforward cars and then we’ve got things which are a bit more romantic, like the Continental R-Type or the Embiricos which has very soft sculptural surfaces, and I think there are elements in this concept that reference those type of cars more, especially the rear haunch and in the bodyside.”
The front of the EXP 100 concept is striking for its lit-up grille – a collaboration with lighting artist Moritz Waldemeyer who’s well-known in the fashion and music industries, for making, among other things, a light headdress for Jamiroquai (!). He has worked with car companies like Audi and Hyundai on exhibitions before, but never on a car itself until the EXP 100. Gregory suggested the concept’s face could be a great influence on future Bentleys while giving a nod to older ones too.
“If you look at the front end, we’ve referenced some of our squarer cars from our heritage like the Blower and Blue Train. They were big cars with big grilles and their lights sat further ahead than the grille, but from the front they looked like they were intersecting. What I’m particularly excited about is this new interpretation of what a Bentley face could be. The graphical elements are really interesting to me.”
Gregory also echoes Boydell’s assertion that the car is a much bigger deal than just a wonderfully-well executed birthday present to the company and its employees. “We don’t do concept cars very often and when we do, they’re normally a bit of a preview of what we intend to do in the next couple of years. This is not. It’s a vision of 2035 and the reason we chose that year is that everything we wanted to support in that Bentley was aligned with integrity and extrapolated from a technology road map. These ideas are not just fluff, or pie in the sky, they’re things we actually intend to deliver. This is us setting ourselves a target.”
At first sight, through these eyes – and indeed in the opinion of everyone we spoke to at the event – the EXP 100 is an aesthetically beautiful concept, but it is brimming with interesting and future-feasible ideas inside and out too. Up close, from the exterior surfacing and shutlines, to the original interior material choices and applications, it is also a brilliantly executed model too. Rest assured, CDN will be endeavouring to go into much greater depth on this concept’s design and development in future months.
