► We speak to the Bentley boss
► He’s also the man behind the 918 Spyder
► Taken from CAR’s January 2025 issue
Nearly 30 years a Porsche man, Frank-Steffen Walliser is now steering Bentley as CEO and chairman. Fluent in future powertrains and platforms and plugged into Wolfsburg’s decision-making apparatus, it’s not hard to see how the man behind the 918 Spyder bagged the job.
Behind us, the picture-perfect Swiss mountain resort we left five minutes ago continues to free-falls into our recent past, the not inconsiderable speed with which we sweep around each hairpin taking us further from Andermatt and closer to the heavens. Ahead, the sashaying mountain road – smooth, empty, dry and set in a landscape so dizzyingly vast and beautiful I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry – is doing a decent impression of perfection.
And next to me, suede-rimmed wheel in his hands, accelerator pedal very much under his right foot, new-ish Bentley CEO Frank-Steffen Walliser is talking, chuckling, driving and trying (but mostly failing) to summon some a suitably sombre tone as we discuss the demise of Bentley’s W12 engine. (We’re in the new flagship Continental GT Speed, which has filled the W12-shaped vacuum in its nose with a V8 plug-in hybrid powertrain of significant potency.)
‘Looking at the competitors, yes, they made different decisions, saying they are going to stay [with their flagship engines; Aston Martin has heavily revised its twin-turbo V12 for the new Vanquish, and Ferrari and Lamborghini will retain their V12s for the foreseeable]. But driving our alternative is extremely good.’
It’s at this point, perhaps for emphasis, that Frank flexes his ankle, filling the cosy cabin with sumptuous V8 racket and firing the Conti up the road like a wet bar of soap squeezed with both hands. ‘I have a W12 company car, a [previous-generation] Continental GT,’ he continues. ‘The engine is nice, it’s unique and it’s amazing from a technical perspective. But do I miss it? Yes, for the heritage and the engineering. But on the road, this is perfect.’
It’s hard to argue. Next question.
I’ve long been curious and, well, I’m 99% sure this is the moment: that I’ll never get a better chance than right now to try to try to understand the inner workings of the labyrinthine VW Group. Specifically, how it decides which of its tech- and investment-hungry brands gets the really good stuff. Is it like Dragons’ Den, perhaps? Brand bosses and CTOs shuffling in, nervously making their case and, on a good day, leaving with three-chamber air suspension? Or is it more Gladiator: a secret coliseum somewhere in Wolfsburg from which the victor emerges, bloodied but clutching an electronic limited-slip diff?
‘Ah, now, this is maybe one of the secrets of the Volkswagen Group – and if I’m being honest, I’m still looking for the answer.’ Frank’s being coy, of course. This is the man behind Porsche’s remarkable 918 Spyder, a car that conquered so much fresh territory technically it must have run out of flags to plant, not to mention the mid-engined 911 RSR racecar and the new ‘T-Hybrid’ GTS 911. If anyone knows how to get the good stuff it’s Frank.
‘The question is good, and when I think about it part of the answer is definitely your network; the people you know. There’s no general decision board saying, “Right, this technology goes there, this goes here…” If you have a trustful relationship and know where the decisions made you can look into the cycle plans, you know the guys, and you can figure out what you can take. But then you have to be open-minded because in engineering, when you see an early prototype, honestly the experience is normally not good. It’s still to be developed and refined. So you have to judge, “Okay, this would fit our car?” And if you’re not convinced you have to think, “Is it the state of the R&D that is not convincing or the is it the technology itself?” It certainly won’t be right for Bentley at that stage, so you must look at the potential.’
There it is, then: proof, were it needed, that networks are as vitally important within the Byzantine VW Group as they are without it. And when Frank explains the transformative couple of months that plucked him from Porsche, which he joined more nearly three decades ago, and shifted him to Crewe, you get the sense his network is formidable.
‘Everything was at short notice,’ he insists. ‘I’d had some general talks before about what the future might look like. After working for some years, as I have, you have some connections in the Group. You exchange ideas and talk to people, and I’d already driven some Bentley vehicles in my previous role [the business car-busting vice president complete vehicle architecture and characteristics at Porsche]. At the end of March I got the call, asking if I would be interested. I spoke to my wife, we got on a plane and we drove around a bit in a rental car, everything undercover. I made the decision on my side, and then for sure you have to go through the Group.
But I’ve had a very good connection with [VW Group CEO and Porsche CEO] Oliver Blume for many years, so that was not the question. He was in favour. And the driving force behind it was Gernot Döllner at Audi. He is also a long-time friend – we started at same time, and we’ve always been close. We did a lot of things in parallel, always challenging each other. On the 918 he did the technical concept and the show car, then handed it over to me. We sometimes discuss which was the more difficult part…’
Frank’s first day as CEO and chairman of Bentley was July 1 2024. And what a time to join. The full extent of Volkswagen’s financial pain is global news and eye-watering. Audi, too, is in the teeth of a storm. Electrification – not long ago a bandwagon at which everyone was launching themselves – appears now to be a particularly nasty combination of brutally expensive investment and limited return, certainly in the short term. And all the while shifting, wildly inconsistent global legislation adds yet another layer of hideous complication. Is this the time to be putting a guy with no prior CEO experience in charge of Bentley?
‘If you look at the job I did on the 918 Spyder, it was really more than one job. I was also looking after the complete vehicle: purchasing, production, customer relation, sales, marketing efforts. It was not only the engineering. And that was really exciting. Yes, there was a certain complexity. But it was a lot of fun making the decisions to deliver the car to customers. It was everything right up until the moment when you hand over the key to the customer, saying, “Now it’s finished, and you can drive it.” It’s an unbelievable thrill, and really you have to keep this moment always in mind during a project – the original concept of the car and that moment when you will hand over the key and say, “What do you think?”
‘It’s the same when I ran the motorsport department [between 2014 and 2019]. We had the racing team but we were also responsible for all the road-legal GT cars [Frank owns a 991 911 GT3 Touring], the engineering, motorsports for the customer racing, our own sales organisation, marketing, the Carrera Cups… I always considered this a small company inside the company, and this was how we ran it.
‘For me Bentley is kind of an extension of this, and what really thrills me the most is having this mixture of technical stuff but also marketing, the brand, communication, customer contacts, production, aftersales – the full picture. How many car brands are there in the world? Maybe 100, without the Chinese? And how often do you get the chance to run one? Obviously, Bentley is not mine. But that sense of responsibility really appealed to me; it really excites me.’
The current line-up (the Conti GT 2+2, the Flying Spur and two Bentayga variants) excites him too, not least because of the potential still to be tapped.
‘The current offering is very strong. I think in many ways, from a driving perspective the Bentayga is underrated. I just drove it again on the roads of north Wales, with some of the competitors, and it is very, very good. But while I understand the background and why certain decisions were made – and I definitely do not blame anyone – the last update of the car [which arrived in 2020, and comprised detail changes to the suspension and cockpit, together with an exterior refresh which didn’t look as extensive as it was] did not push it as far as it could have done.’
You sense Bentley’s failure to tap the rapidly expanding luxury SUV market quite as hard as it may have done gnaws at Frank. ‘Definitely there is more potential in the SUV. The Bentayga kind of defined this segment [we’d had sporty, premium SUVs before. But the Bentley blazed a trail for the likes of the DBX, the Cullinan, the Urus and the Purosangue], as the Continental GT did before it. The segment is growing tremendously and we have not benefitted from that as much as we could have done, for different reasons.’
The first EV should help, now confirmed as a ‘luxury urban SUV’, due 2026. Bentley claims the new car, which won’t replace any of the brand’s existing models but complement them, is the first ‘true luxury urban SUV’ – though precisely what makes it more urban than any other luxury electric SUV remains to be seen. An uplift in comfort is promised, together with a level of agility beyond the current plug-in hybrid and combustion-engined line-up.
‘It will be a little bit more compact, for a Bentley I must add – under 5 metres in length [the Macan is 4.7; the Bentayga 5.1-5.3] and easier to drive in urban areas,’ he explains. ‘It will be super-versatile and you will be able to use it for both long range and for the city. We want to attract new customers – there is not a lot of electric demand among today’s Bentley customers – and we think this vehicle will help us do this. Optimising travel time is not just about range. We will have incredible fast charging and the range will fit all the needs of our customers.’
The new car is part of a prudent re-engineering of Bentley’s initially hyper-aggressive electrification timeline. The original plan, announced in January 2022, was to launch five EVs between 2025 and 2030 – the so-called ‘Five-in-Five plan’ – in an ambitious £2.5bn push to establish Bentley as a leader in sustainable luxury. The brand’s ‘all-electric by 2030’ intention has also been revised, to 2035. We’ll see a new model every year between 2026 and 2035 but the rollout will comprise PHEVs as well as EVs. Bentley’s also not done with purely combustion-engined cars, hinting at a hot Bentayga in 2025.
‘The first electric Bentley will be 2026, on sale 2027,’ confirms Frank. ‘This is the part of the strategy we have been concentrating on since I arrived. Things could still change. We have five-year cycles, and when you look back five years from now, to 2019, pre-Covid, the picture was completely different.’
As is consistently the case at the moment it’s weak customer demand that’s prompted Crewe’s re-think, rather than any serious technical, production or financial challenge.
‘You can only sell it if your customer is convinced; you cannot push it. For sure it also depends a lot on the regulators, the political and tax boundary conditions. But the luxury car it is not something you buy to go from A to B. They are outside of tax optimisation, and realistically you cannot ask for a tax reduction on luxury cars. So, this is a real market. It is not driven from the outside. I would say what we’re seeing in the [electric] market at the moment is a dip. Electric demand will come back, at different speeds in different categories and in different countries, and we will be prepared for that. When we arrive with our first BEV in 2026/2027 it will coincide with a second wave of customer acceptance.’
Just as Frank’s spider’s web of a network stands Bentley in good stead for the coming years, so too will his familiarity with the platforms around which it will create its next decade of new models. The urban SUV will ride on an advanced version of the PPE platform already in use in/underneath Porsche’s electric Macan and Audi’s Q6 e-tron and new A6. Put it to him that the prospect of a Bentley that feels and drives like any of the above doesn’t feel right and he smiles a weary smile.
‘The question is always: “What is the platform?” But really there are so many variants, and this makes sense when you have the requirements of so many different brands. Software also has a huge impact. Has Crewe been influencing the design of PPE for years? It’s more like “What can we take?” We can do whatever we want; whatever is appropriate for the brand. We just need a platform that gives us a good base on battery power, charging speed, the electrical architecture and software.
‘This is where I think sometimes Bentley is misjudged. It is also a technology company – we’re handling all this stuff. It’s not only stitching and leather and nice interiors, and I’ve not seen many [other luxury car companies] in the world capable of doing this to this level. Honestly, no one. It is not just a carryover platform. The engineering job is way bigger – to bring a Bentley-ness to every part of the platform, even where you cannot see it. This is very important, so that we are unique.’
Will Frank’s Bentleys feel different to drive? After all, you’ll find his fingerprints on many of the most celebrated Porsche sports cars of the last 20 years. There’s also something of a contradiction at the heart of the brand, isn’t there? On one hand Bentley has this incredible heritage – the Bentley boys, Le Mans, Pikes Peak, GT3 racing – and, on the new Speed, very Porsche-esque tech such as rear-wheel steering and electronic differentials. But you sense too that an awful lot of Bentley customers just want a very quiet, comfortable and luxurious motor car.
‘This is an interesting point, and one I’m discussing with the engineering team more or less every day. I would say ‘comfort’ is too generic. “Effortless” describes it way better, so the car is easy to handle. You notice it too when you drive the heritage cars. I’m convinced that if a car is really driving properly, with top steering feel, throttle response and great brake pedal feel, this is all part of effortless, regardless of how you drive. I also don’t believe that to be comfortable you have to be soft. A car that is soggy is not good to drive because it demands more of your attention. It’s a like a good racecar. A car is usually fastest, certainly in terms of repeatable performance, when it is the easiest to drive, because the driver is less distracted and more confident.’
Talking of racecars… ‘Are there motorsport plans? No, not at the moment. Would racing again fit with the brand? Absolutely yes. In terms of the World Endurance Championship it would help if they could agree a single set of regulations. But right now it is not a top priority. It is the same with a Bentley sports car. I would like to do it but it is not the priority. We also have to work out what exactly it might be; a sports car, a super performance car, or is it something else again?’
For now, the success of sports cars and motorsports, with which Frank forged his reputation, must take a back seat. It’s as a strategist, engineer and arch networker that Bentley needs him to shine.
As editor, Ben leads CAR magazine and its content strategy. One of the team who's just as happy on two wheels as four.
By Ben Miller
The editor of CAR magazine, story-teller, average wheel count of three
