SUITED AND REBOOTED

The limited-run Batur has a tough job – linking the petrol-engined past to an electric future while holding true to Bentley’s 100-year heritage

- PAUL HORRELL

File under 'British Eccentricity'. Bentley has decided to show the main features of its new design language for the electric era... on a 12-cylinder petrol burner that's the most powerful road car it has ever built.

The Batur is another collector's Bentley, a sequel to the sold-out Bacalar roadster. But it looks very different, and not just because it's a coupe. Only 18 of them will be made, and Bentley has already shown the design in secret to some of its best customers. Chalk it up as a success: it sold out many weeks before the public unveiling at the Monterey Car Week in late August.

At a price of £1.65 million each. That's plus VAT or the local equivalent, but I guess these are the sort of collectors who go by Leona Helmsley's motto "only the little people pay taxes" (said shortly before she was imprisoned for tax evasion). Whatever their tax arrangements, they have taste, eh?

The Batur is a thorough but surprisingly subtle rebody the Continental Speed. And wonderful though the Speed is, I guess an extra dollop of horsepower and handling dynamism can do no harm. So the W12 engine is titivated up to 740bhp and 737lb-ft of torque a nice round 1,000Nm if you speak metric.

The Batur might be remembered as a pivotal car. Facing back, it's the last and most powerful of the W12s and the high point of Bentley's petrol era. Facing forward, it's the start of a design reboot. That makes it the first part of Bentley's answer to a question that faces all the extant luxury and supercar makers. After a history - more than a century in this case - of building cars that are visibly shaped around mammoth engines, what happens to the design when it's necessary to make electric cars?