Bentley paints bleak picture for rest of Britain’s car industry

The year 2022 will go down as the most contradictory in the 103-year history of Bentley Motors.

As CEO Adrian Hallmark put it to reporters on Wednesday (Dec 7), it has been the British carmaker’s most successful year, and its biggest crisis year, all in one. He recounted brushes with disaster that Bentley managed to sidestep on its way to record sales and profit. And he alluded to why other UK manufacturers will not be so fortunate, delivering a bleak assessment of damage done by Brexit and the future of the industry as it goes electric.

In short, when one is selling vehicles for about 220,000 euros (S$313,842) on average, one can afford to pay an electricity bill that has quadrupled, to attract and retain a workforce in the face of a disconcerting labour shortage, and to import a relatively small number of expensive batteries that increasingly will replace domestically built combustion engines.

“Not all of what we are experiencing is because of Ukraine,” Hallmark said of post-Brexit UK. “That has definitely compounded the problem. But there is no question that directly or indirectly pushing hundreds of thousands of productive, willing workers out of the workforce has led to shortages in hospitality, in logistics, in all kinds of industries, and in itself, it actually reduces the economic activity.”

Bentley has risen above all the morass around it by mastering the art of selling over-the-top opulence.

The manufacturer used to be too willing to let dealers dictate which cars it produced and too often settled for simple-spec models. Now that its well-heeled clientele have more say in what is rolling off assembly lines, pricing per vehicle has shot up.

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Previous management apparently took for granted how willing its customers were to splurge on a high-gloss, dark fiddleback eucalyptus accents around their air-conditioning vents (a £1,655 or S$2,740 option,) or “3D wood” door inserts (£10,050, thank you very much).

Do £71,700 seats sound a bit steep? Maybe not, if you have a hankering for handcraftsmanship (712 stitches go into each diamond sewn into the highest-end Mulliner models).

As successful as Bentley’s rethink has been – the company started the year with its best order book ever, double what it was at the beginning of 2021, which had been a record – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an almost calamitous event. The manufacturer depends on the latter country for wire harnesses that, in a worst-case scenario, it was going to have to go without for as long as six months.

“To put that in context, that would have been three to four times the length of closure that we had to do for Covid,” Hallmark said. “And if you shut down for four or five months, you’re basically bankrupt.”

The assemblers of those components in Ukraine ended up going into work at night, toiling away in blackout conditions. Staff carried on despite occasionally needing to seek shelter in underground bunkers, and Bentley “never lost a single part”, Hallmark said.

Then came China’s sporadic lockdowns, including in Shanghai. From there, Bentley “ironically and unbelievably” sources three semiconductors that were part of the wiring looms made in Ukraine, Hallmark said. When the megacity closed down for about four weeks, the carmaker had no way of getting in touch with anyone and was down to just three weeks of stock in the pipeline.

Nevertheless, Bentley has the capacity to produce about 15,000 cars and has managed to hit that this year. It will not push those boundaries in 2023, Hallmark said, in part because orders from China have slowed.

That is not to say that the company is shying away from investment. It will plow £2.5-3 billion over the next six years into its manufacturing complex in Crewe, England, which will go through a re-invention befitting the radical overhaul of its product line-up. By 2026, Bentley will offer only plug-in hybrid and fully electric cars. By the end of the decade, it will complete the switch to vehicles powered entirely by batteries.

As crucial as batteries will be to Bentley’s future, it does not need a factory for them in the UK, said Hallmark. The cost of shipping them in from elsewhere will be manageable, and it can do so in a carbon-neutral way, he said.

The broader UK car industry, on the other hand, could be in trouble. It will be difficult to import batteries in bigger volumes because they cost about six times what engines do. The amount of downsizing that has occurred in car assembly also works against the business case for battery suppliers to swoop in.

“If you think of the manufacturers in the UK, there’s not sufficient critical mass,” Hallmark said. “You’ve got not enough production in the UK – not only for batteries, by the way, for many other major components. You don’t have enough critical mass of a ubiquitous-design cell to get the economies of scale that you need.” Bloomberg