And this new Bentley owner is from China.
Bentley Motors has shown its resilience to global economic pressure with a strong sales figure for 2020. This luxury British car brand which is now owned by the Volkswagen Group has managed to weather the Covid-19 economy storm and deliver an impressive 11,206 luxury vehicles around the world in 2020, which is a 2 percent increase over its 2019 global sales.
Despite a huge drop in demand in Middle East in 2020, demand in China rose an incredible 48 percent to give Bentley that higher than expected total global sales for 2020.
The company’s success came the introduction of a number of exciting new models, combined with greater global availability of other popular models. In particular, the all-new Flying Spur. Other successful models include the Bentley Continental GT (24 percent) and GT Convertible (15 percent) together accounted for 39 percent of total sales, finishing the year as Bentley’s number one selling model line.
However, in spite of the run out of the previous generation model, and delays to market entry of the all-new Bentayga due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this luxury SUV was still the biggest selling single model, accounting for 37 percent of total sales.
Bentley Motors celebrated the 200,000th luxury car built at Crewe in England in the company’s illustrious 100-year-plus history. The Bentayga Hybrid, destined for a Chinese customer, met the oldest surviving Bentley, EXP 2, and a number of long serving colleagues, as it rolled off the production line at the home of Bentley in Crewe this week. This crowns an extraordinary 20-year period in which the success driven by modern day models such as the Continental GT and Bentayga has truly changed the face of Bentley Motors.
The manufacturing milestone is even more remarkable when considered that the 200,000th car is the latest in 155,582 vehicles built at Crewe since 2003 which was the breakthrough year the Continental GT was originally launched as the first model of the modern Bentley era. Today, Bentley is building 85 cars per day, the same output in one month two decades ago.
In comparison to Bentley’s modern era, in the year of Bentley’s first existence, 1919, through to 2002, the company built 44,418 luxury cars of which 38,933 of them in Crewe. Among that total were many iconic models of their time, including the Bentley Blower, the R-Type Continental, Mulsanne, Arnage and Azure. Incredibly, records show that 84 per cent of all cars built for the UK market are still on the road today.
A major investment programme at the Crewe factory since 2003 has gone hand-in-hand with the success of the Bentley Continental GT, the definitive luxury Grand Tourer. The 80,000th individual, made-to-order example was built in January this year.
