Bentley appears to be going against the current
Besides the change that we’re seeing all throughout the car making industry, towards more fuel efficiency, hybrids and electric vehicles, there’s yet another interesting shift that seems to be spreading to all the major car manufacturers, the shift towards less cylinders.
Everybody seems to figuring out various ways of making smaller displacement engines but which also generate the same horsepower like their more cylinder rich counterparts. This has lead to the current trend of turbocharged V-6 engines replacing standard V-8 engines, and in turn turbocharged V-8 engines replacing V-10s and V-12s.
However the people over at Bentley are taking a different approach. It would appear that Bentley is actually going towards larger 12-cylinder engines instead of replacing them with turbocharged V-8s. Trends are an interesting thing regardless of whether you’re talking about music, fashion or the car making industry in this case, but they’re even more interesting when someone goes against one that seems to have been generally accepted.
One reason behind this move might be so that they can advertise on their exclusivity, in order to overshadow their rival, Rolls Royce. On the other hand it might be as simple as the fact that Volkswagen had a bunch of left over 6.0-liter W-12 engines because they cut the Phaeton from their 2012 lineup – the Phaeton was going to be the receiver of the W-12 engines – and decided to outfit Bentley with the 444-horsepower capable engines.
Then there’s also the Azure T to take into consideration, its peculiar six-and-three-quarter-liter engine provides 450 horsepower and gets 9 mpg; this means that the 12 mpg that the W-12 cylinder gets is quite a tempting alternative.
These are of course mostly speculations but who knows what the real reasons behind this going against the flow actually are.
