Comment: Will the Bentley EXP12 Speed 6e make production?

The new Bentley EXP12 Speed 6e looks almost too good to be a production car, which is fine for now, because nobody at Crewe will confirm that it has a showroom future.

“We want to assess what our customers and the wider world think,” say the designers, the familiar litany of every such team that ever put a concept on display. “You’ll see elements of the car in our next production model,” they say, in this case the all-new Continental GT, due at the Frankfurt motor show in September.

Yet the EXP12 has better production prospects than most of this week’s Geneva concepts. For one thing, this is a developed, convertible version of the EXP10 hybrid coupé the company showed this time two years ago. Take Bentley’s proud tradition of translating some of its EXP cars for production, throw in the fact that this one is another expression of a two-seater concept that was well received in 2015 and you have stronger than usual indications that a production model must surely be under close consideration.

Add Bentley boss Wolfgang Dürheimer’s oft-expressed desire to reduce the cyclical nature of his company’s sales performance by widening the model line-up and you reveal a strong possibility that this car could be making a stellar production debut in two or three years’ time. Is 2019 too soon? Okay, 2020 then…

Steve Cropley

Title: Editor-in-chief

Steve Cropley is the oldest of Autocar’s editorial team, or the most experienced if you want to be polite about it. He joined over 30 years ago, and has driven many cars and interviewed many people in half a century in the business.

Cropley, who regards himself as the magazine’s “long stop”, has seen many changes since Autocar was a print-only affair, but claims that in such a fast moving environment he has little appetite for looking back.

He has been surprised and delighted by the generous reception afforded the My Week In Cars podcast he makes with long suffering colleague Matt Prior, and calls it the most enjoyable part of his working week.