Back off the bling, Bentley. It's too much. 

​Beauty might be in the eye of the beholder, but that relies on the holder having fully functioning eyes. And not being rabidly interested in paisley. But there’s long been a chat in the Electrifying office as to whether or not electric cars should lean harder into the aesthetic of electric power, or ape more traditional passenger cars so as not to scare the consumer horses. It’s a tricky one - the transition to new tech isn’t the work of a minute, and sometimes the best course of action isn’t to introduce all of the new at once. 

Unusually for me - having not often been a fan of fence-sitting - I think there’s a middle ground, and it largely depends on the manufacturer. And thus, to my point... 

Bentley has just released the Torcal, the first fully-electric car from the company and it’s first all-new car in around a decade. About 97% of it is a handsome re-think of what a modern, slightly-smaller-than-a-Bentayga SUV looks like. Right up until you get to the front, where the designers have strapped a two-foot wide clear plastic fish tank filled with sparkly diamond lights in lieu of an actual grille. 

New Bentley Torcal Preview

We get it, the electric Torcal doesn’t need a grille for cooling an internal combustion engine. But it also doesn’t need a basketful of Christmas decorations strapped to the front. The reason it’s so offensive? Because it’s Bentley: bastion of quiet opulence and storied tradition, power, grace and pace. It looks cheap, and more in-keeping with a Chinese fashion sense - which tends to enjoy more illumination and full length dress-grilles. It reminds me of the Hongqi H9, or the minivans with the bonkers fronts, like Toyota Alphard/Vellfires. 

Which makes it ironic, because in aping the look the Far-Eastern market leans toward, it removes the very reason that Bentley is so revered. Indeed, the pitch for the Torcal is largely that it’s an ‘authentic’ Bentley product, and that it is also a brilliant Bentley first, just one that happens to have an electric drivetrain. My contention is that, by making the grille so very unconventional, the subtlety baby has been unceremoniously pitched out with the bathwater. 

Of course, Bentley isn’t the only one; Mercedes has doubled down on EV spangly grilles filled with stars, BMW with swappable welcome animations, light-up grilles and ‘X’- shaped headlight graphics that remind me of the cartoon eyes when the protagonist has just been smacked in the head with an Acme anvil. Some of those elements obviously carry across to different drivetrains, but it’s the EVs that suffer most. 

And herein lies the problem. Just blanking out a previously grille-ish space with a body coloured panel feels lazy. Yet the Torcal’s incongruous treatment feels like change for change’s sake. So there’s got to be a middle ground - and it’s probably with the cars that never tried to have an ICE analogue in the first place. Slimmer inlets, lower noses (you don’t need clearance if the packaging is good), different visual graphics. 

We’ve been through the phase of working out how electric actually delivers, so now it’s time for the real revolution - cars that don’t necessarily follow the two or three-box, papered-over grille of traditionalism. Funky teardrops? Why not? Different packaging solutions for interiors, people and things. EV architecture brings with it a design freedom that we’re only just scratching the surface of. So let’s stop with the cheap-shot chintz and really play with the freedom that electric propulsion can give car designers. Who knows, with something really revolutionary, they might just end up leading the charge.