CREWE, England -- Bentley Motors hopes to use a strategy of handcraftsmanship vs. machinery to distance itself from competitors creeping into its ultraluxury turf.
Leather and genuine wood are lavished on the interiors and seats of Bentley cars. Much of the work is done by hand at this factory site, the Pyms Lane plant, made up of World War II-era brick buildings.
When Volkswagen AG purchased Bentley in 1998, it inherited the plant, where sibling brand Rolls-Royce cars also were made. Rolls-Royce was sold to BMW AG in the same year and now has a plant built by its new owner.
VW has pumped 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) into the 1,630,969 square feet of plant space sprawled over a massive site.
The factory produced 11,020 cars last year, half of them from the Continental family of sedans, coupes and convertibles. The Continental GT was the first model developed under VW to roll off the plant's assembly lines, in 2003.
But before the cars come off assembly, they undergo handwork, considerably more than those of the premium European competitors, including Rolls-Royce and Maybach, Bentley managers at the factory said.
Inside, sewing machines whirl in the trim and seat department. Thin, fragile wood veneers are carefully handled by gloved experts. Potential customers walk through the factory with a Bentley expert, looking at an extensive rack of tablecloth-sized bull hides in various hues and shades, touching them to feel the softness.
Duerheimer: "Certified center of excellence"
CEO Wolfgang Duerheimer said in an interview earlier this year that "high performance -- perfect design -- perfect British design" would continue to be Bentley's competitive hallmark.
"What can Bentley contribute to the Volkswagen Group? We are the certified center of excellence for wood and leather, and it is my plan to expand it to other areas."
Duerheimer said one of those areas is the production of high-performance engines, particularly the W-12 powerplant the factory makes for Bentley and for Audi.
On average, the plant builds 50 Continentals and Flying Spurs and five Mulsannes each day. The Continental GT V-8 starts at $201,225 -- about $10,000 more than the Mercedes-Maybach S600 which starts at $190,275.
The Mulsanne sedan has few peers with its $309,425 sticker. All prices include shipping.
Workers at Bentley Motors' Pyms Lane plant in Crewe, England, mark flaws in bull hides that will have to be cut out. Bentley won't use leather with imperfections.
Bentley touts the handmade quality of its cars. It takes 399 hours to build the flagship Mulsanne -- 200 of those hours devoted to crafting the interior. It takes 104 hours to build a Continental GT coupe and 130 hours to build the Flying Spur sedan.
Production is being readied for next year's all-new Bentayga crossover. Projected volumes weren't disclosed. But in an interview with Automotive News earlier this year, Duerheimer said initially 3,600 will be built annually and one-third will go to the United States.
About 3,600 employees, including Duerheimer, work at Pyms Lane, with 546 on the Continental and Flying Spur production line and 144 on the Mulsanne line.
Noel Thompson uses a kitchen fork to poke markings for hand-stitching on leather for a steering wheel.
Noel Thompson, 62, a skilled coach trimmer who has been at the factory for 46 years, demonstrated that the Bentley mix of old-world craftsmanship, nearly bespoke, and modern manufacturing can co-exist.
It takes 31/2 to 4 hours to make a steering wheel. A $150,000 machine cuts the leather for each wheel, making it slightly narrower than the circumference so it can be stretched and glued.
Markings have to be made to show the worker where to hand-stitch the leather, Thompson said pulling out an aged eating utensil: "This is the world-famous fork.
"We have gone back to the old way of doing it -- we use a fork," Thompson said as he poked the uniformly spaced marks into the leather as you would on a pie crust.
It takes two hours to sew thread around the wheel using a cross-stitch, he said. "I sew with two needles in one hand because you cross over quicker.
"I have done more of these than anyone else in the company."
Over at the wood shop, operations manager John Fisher displays the $250,000-plus stock of wood veneers of cigar-paper thickness. The veneers come from the root ball at the base of a tree -- "that is where we get that classic burl effect," Fisher said.
The root ball is peeled on a lathe the way you would an apple.
Bentley uses nine types of wood, including Madrone from the olive tree, Vavona from the giant redwood tree, walnut, cherry wood and eucalyptus. Sheets of about 0.6 mm are stacked by type and individual tree.
Fisher said the factory representative will go through 72,000 square meters of veneer from the supplier in Italy and "of that we will bring back 30 to 35 meters."
A single car requires anywhere from 17 to 24 sets of veneers that are mirror matched for left and right patterns. "On average to get about five square meters, we use 10 square meters to get rid of the imperfections," Fisher said.
The craftsman selects the wood, and it is cut by a laser. The pressed and flattened wood gets five coats of lacquer and is again flattened and polished by hand.
"We do have some automated polishing, but it is finished by hand due to the complexity of some of the parts," Fisher said.
They're just as fussy at the leather workshop, where only the skin of bulls is used for seats and trim because it is more taut than that of cows and has fewer imperfections.
Gary Lazenby, senior production manager for seats and leathers, says only leather is used for the seats and interior trim. "There are no plastic, synthetic or cloth seats."
The average Continental requires about 12 whole bull skins and about 250 individual pieces of leather. The Mulsanne's interior needs the skins from 17 bulls -- about 400 pieces of leather.
The leather comes from across Europe, usually Germany, from slaughterhouses.
"We do not kill anything for the leather; everything is a byproduct -- and, no, you are not the first to ask," Lazenby said.
Like the wood, the leather is inspected for defects, which are marked by hand and cut out. There are certain "minor" imperfections that can be used, but they will go under a seat or in an area where they are not visible, he said.
Bentley assembles its own seats -- the frames and mechanicals come from Volkswagen. Workers sew in different areas, handling seats or dashboards or headliners. About 75 employees sew seats and "nothing else," Lazenby said. "We try to use the best technology, but we rely on the guys and the girls."
Bentley allows buyers to customize their interiors, which can be as simple as a crest on the headrest or as elaborate as offbeat colors and trim.
"We recently did a car with a black interior with pink stitching and a heart on the head rest," Lazenby said.
About 75 employees sew seats and trims.
Customers like to go to the plant to make color and interior selections so Bentley opened a Lineage Studio two years ago. Classic Bentleys, graphics on how a Bentley is designed, samples of wood, leather and metal and even the latest auto show concepts are housed in a museum setting.
"It has stayed a lot longer than planned," especially since a lot of the traffic includes potential owners, said Brett Boydell, head of interior design. The studio shows "some of the things that make Bentley unique compared to other cars," Boydell says.
"What makes a Bentley a Bentley is the willingness to go to the next level."
And that means using not only leather, wood and polished metal but unusual materials that can also be premium, such as the copper and aluminum featured on the EXP 10 Speed 6 concept coupe unveiled at the Geneva auto show in March, Boydell said. The EXP 10 hasn't yet been approved for production, but Bentley executives say the car has received a thumbs-up at various auto shows and customer events.
Boydell designed the concept's interior. "There are concepts leading to where we want to go to, and you will see some of those going through the pipeline."
But the "core DNA," will remain -- for instance the quilting on leather seats," Boydell said. "It is diamond patterned, and that is signature to Bentley on the sportier models. It is always on the top-of-the-line."
The wood on the interior of the doors has the diamond pattern in unusual places. "On the EXP 10, we milled into the wood," he said. "There are ways to keep your heritage but move the design forward."
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