Bentley's Geneva surprise
Take a close look at this picture. It’s all you’re going to get to see, at least for the next five weeks, of the new supercar that Bentley plans to unveil at the upcoming Geneva Motor Show.
What little the automaker is revealing, for now, is that the new model will be “very much the extreme Bentley,” and will rank as the fastest, most powerful production car the British luxury marque has ever brought to market.
A little short of a year ago, and also in Geneva, Bentley sketched out plans to go “green,” Bentley CEO Franz-Josef Paefgen noting, at the time, that, “the security of our fuel supply and climate change.” According to Paefgen, the amount of CO2, the prime culprit in global warming, emitted by Bentley products by will be reduced “at least 15 percent” by 2012.
How to deliver more power and performance – and less CO2? Maybe it’ll become more apparent when we see the new Bentley in person, as the 2009 Swiss show. For the moment, we’ll have to settle for the suggestion that the car we’re seeing – likely the replacement for the current Continental line – will be capable of running on biofuel.
Bentley, we should add, could use a bit of a boost, whatever powers it. It’s long been conventional wisdom, in the auto industry, that luxury products, especially in the Bentley range, are immune from recession. The current downturn has proven that wrong, with the British maker showing losses in line with more mainstream brands. But so far, we’ve also been told, Volkswagen AG’s top-line brand has been able to keep its operations in the black.