To look upon the new ultra-bespoke limited edition Bentley Mulliner Batur, unveiled at Monterey Car Week this week, is to gaze into the exciting future of the world’s oldest and most prestigious coachmaker. It is more than simply a beautiful, handcrafted and exceptionally powerful grand tourer – it is an exquisite canvas of automotive design that showcases the look of future Bentley cars as it embraces the era of electric driving.
All future EV models from Bentley will embody the design language of the Batur, which takes classic features from Bentley’s rich past and reinterprets them into new, cleaner forms that rely on the use of contrast to provide definition.
This fresh blueprint centres around three core principles. The first is Resting Beast Stance, which gives the Batur the appearance of sitting on its rear haunches, the back wheels, with an intimidating posture. The second is called Upright Elegance, identified by the redesigned grille which, while still unmissably infused with the Bentley DNA, is now more upright in appearance. The final principle is Endless Bonnet: the only solid shape in the Batur’s otherwise clean and fluid design is the bold, elongated bonnet which helps emphasise the notion of the car sitting on its haunches.
While the Batur provides a vision of Bentley’s electric future, the muscular bonnet of the 18 examples being hand built by Mulliner in Crewe in fact houses the most powerful version of Bentley’s iconic W12 engine ever created. Engineered especially for the Batur, it now produces at least 730bhp and 1003Nm of torque, making it Bentley’s most powerful road car yet. It represents a highly appropriate celebration of a legendary engine, this representing its final swansong before electric powertrains drive Bentley’s exciting future.
To ensure the most engaging experience possible, the Batur shares the Continental GT Speed’s three-chamber air suspension system and 48v electric active anti-roll boll, as well as an all-wheel steering system for increased agility and stability, and an electronic limited-slip differential with torque vectoring. It rides on a set of striking and bespoke 22-inch wheels.
Just like the 2021 Bentley Mulliner Bacalar, the beautiful two-seat grand tourer which first appeared as a concept but is now being produced in a batch of just 12 examples for customers, the Batur is named after a natural body of water – Lake Batur in Bali, Indonesia.
Also like the Bacalar, the Batur offers almost endless personalisation opportunities for its customers. The colour and finish of every surface and component can be specified to reflect the customer’s individual tastes, while material options include sustainable natural fibre composites, low-CO2 leather and even 3D printed 18K gold.
The Batur demonstrates how Bentley has mastered the art of looking to the future without forgetting all the attributes that have made it one of the world’s finest car makers ever since its birth in 1919.
