Bentley has a special goodbye planned for its trademark W-12.
On Friday, the automaker announced that it will unveil its third coachbuilt Mulliner model of the modern era early next month. The company has said little about the vehicle, which will succeed the Bacalar Barchetta and Batur coupé, up until now, but the announcement included one extremely tantalizing detail: it will feature the most potent iteration of the automaker’s trademark 12-cylinder mill yet.
It would seem that Bentley is struggling to let go of the W-12, which made its debut in 2003, and has been under the hood of some of its most powerful vehicles, including the Continental GT, Flying Spur Bentayga. In early 2023, the brand announced that the limited-run, Continental GT-based Batur would serve as the mill’s swan song, but it seems that the situation has changed in the year since. Bentley won’t even call it’s the upcoming coachbuilt model the final W-12, instead saying that it is just “among the last ever Bentleys” that will utilize the engine.
Regardless of how many more W-12s Bentley goes on to build, the next Mulliner sounds like it will be the one to get. It will be more powerful than that found in the Batur, which means it will produce more than 740 horsepower and 737 ft lbs of twist. The grand tourer can also accelerate from zero to 60 mph in just 3.3 seconds and hit a top speed of 209 mph which suggests its successor will be a true beast.
Aside from the fact that it will have a W-12, the only other information we have about the next Mulliner is that Bentley plans to build just 16 examples of it and that it will be unveiled on May 7. It also figures to be quite expensive. The Bacalar started at $1.9 million and the Batur at $2.1 million.
While Bentley is preparing to finally say goodbye to the W-12, it’s not done with internal combustion engines just yet. The automaker is working on an EV, which is expected to debut in 2025 or 2026, but it will shift its focus to electrified models going forward, according to Autocar. The mills in those cars and SUVs will just have eight cylinders instead of 12.
