2022 Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid: 536 HP Combined From an Electrified V6

Bentley only announced its first electrified vehicle, the colossal (and colossally pricey) Bentayga plug-in hybrid, a few years back. Being an absolutely stonkingly enormous car, its environmental credentials are a bit neither-here-nor-there, despite qualifying for that all-important federal tax credit so you can drop a few more thou on the interior. But Bentley says the Flying Spur hybrid is designed with efficiency in mind and to be a statement of its environmental intentions going forwards.

The Flying Spur was launched in 2005 and has had three versions so far, making the hybrid edition a fourth. The powertrain is newly developed for this specific car; it's got a 2.9-liter, turbocharged V6 gasoline engine which Bentley says follows a similar design philosophy to its 4.0-liter V8, with all its elements neatly incorporated into the combustion architecture.

Fuel injectors and spark plugs are centralized in each of the combustion chambers to make sure each bit of fuel is burned as efficiently as possible—it delivers more hp per liter of displacement than even the V8 Flying Spur. Then the twin-scroll turbochargers and primary catalytic converters are tucked into the V, so it's all pretty neat under the hood.

That accounts for 410 of the Flying Spur Hybrid's horsepower, so the rest is from its electric motor. It's a permanent magnet synchronous MGU, which is what you want for high-torque, high power delivery and gives you The Numbers in terms of 0-60. The Hybrid will apparently do that in 4.1 seconds, which is 0.1 seconds slower than the V8 Flying Spur but still nothing to complain about in a car this hefty.

You won't be surprised that the interior is pretty luxurious and that Bentley has, to a fairly major extent, resisted the urge to put touchscreens and LEDs all over it. Although you can get plenty of information about the hybrid modes from the infotainment screen, there's actually a dedicated button for flicking between them, which is a nicely physical touch in an increasingly smeared-glass world.

Of those three modes, EV Drive leans the most heavily on the motor and will try and use as little engine as possible. That's to get the Flying Spur Hybrid its first-and-last mile status as super clean, so it'll be certified for the lowest emissions zones in cities. 

There's also Hybrid, which is your road trip mode. Bentley claims, from a full tank, the Flying Spur Hybrid can do 700 kilometers (435 miles) although it didn't say specifically if the battery needs to be fully charged when you roll out.

The third option is Hold Mode, which doesn't draw on the battery power to save it. It might sound stupid but actually, there's kind of a point to it, if you're going to switch to EV Drive at the end of a trip and want to make sure the battery's fully charged beforehand. 

Speaking of the battery, it's 14.1 kilowatt-hours, so not totally insignificant. Like with AMG's hybrid powertrain, it's intended to genuinely have the capacity to run the car on motor alone without immediately flopping. Bentley says in its release that it's expected to have an electric-only range of 40 kilometers (25 miles) but until that's conditions-verified, it's hard to make much of that.

You're probably pretty unlikely, given it's in a hybrid, to actually plug it in but it's weird that the charging seems to be so slow. Bentley is quoting two and a half hours to fill it up from the wall, which really isn't any kind of competitive time for that little. 

There's definitely a few environmentally friendly features skipped. In terms of the car's materials, Bentley is promising absolutely nothing and the only interior option seems to be leather—in five different colors, if you wanna collect a whole set. The exterior has seven base paint options but there are over 60 further ones, including a black mode for when you absolutely have to let people know you have spent money on this thing. 

Ah yes, the cost. Well, if you have to ask then don't buy a Bentley. But if you really want to know, it starts at $204,000—but don't forget those tax credits.

As you'd expect, the Flying Spur Hybrid will be manufactured at Bentley's base in glamorous Crewe, United Kingdom. But you can't buy one there.

Weirdly, you can order it in the U.S. starting now but a footer in Bentley's release says it's not actually available in its home country: "Flying Spur Hybrid is available to order in most markets, but is currently not available in EU27, UK, Switzerland, Israel, Ukraine, Norway, Turkey and Vietnam." There's no clarification of when it will be available in Europe and if you're rich enough to be blowing cash on a Bentley as your daily PHEV runaround, then you probably don't care too much about import taxes either way. But it's at least weird enough to be notable.

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