In advance of the Paris reveal of the new $338,625 Bentley Mulsanne Speed, the company invited us into its Crewe factory near Manchester, England, for a no-limits walk of the assembly line to see why Bentleys in general—and Mulsannes in particular—are so expensive.
The short answer: because of the many, many hands that make Bentley’s giant flagship using old-fashioned metal files, wood rasps, stitching needles, sand paper, and polishing compound. The old ways and materials, sans robots and injection-molded plastic, are the expensive ways today, although the eight weeks and 500 man-hours it takes Bentley to build a Mulsanne is a careful choreography of manual labor and mild automation.
The former is used because the tiny volume of around 1000 Mulsannes per year (starting price: $306,425) means tooling up for wider automation is prohibitively expensive. The latter, meanwhile, is employed strategically to ensure the car has modern assembly tolerances and warrantable build quality. Here is why a Mulsanne costs so much:
1. The Mulsanne’s body isn’t stamped like other cars’
The bare body-in-white, or the naked body shell that alone weighs about 1300 pounds, is made up of around 600 steel and aluminum stampings, all from suppliers. The deeply drawn aluminum front fenders are stamped using a slow, expensive process called superelastic metal forming, in which the aluminum sheet is heated almost to the melting point and then pressed over the die. It’s the only way for Bentley to get such a large, deep, single pressing without having to build up the fender from several different stampings. The punch-outs for the Mulsanne’s trademark large headlights require laser cutting and additional finishing. There are six superelastic stampings on the Mulsanne.
2. The stampings have to be finished by hand
Due to its different metallurgical properties, aluminum can’t be stamped with the sharp creases you can render in steel. The Mulsanne’s body has a character line that starts on the superelastic-formed front fender, continues across the conventionally stamped aluminum door skins, and finishes on the stamped-steel rear quarter panel. This line unavoidably changes shape as it moves across the different materials. To correct this problem, workers painstakingly sand the character line by hand to create a uniform shape. Other automakers avoid this issue by simply settling for whatever shape will work in the material most resistant to creasing.
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3. The body is seamless
On any modern car, different stampings come together at a seam, such as where the roof panel meets the body side. The mainstream industry has lots of creative, cheap ways of dealing with these seams, including plastic filler pieces, or by not bothering to hide them at all. However, Bentley wants the Mulsanne to have a solid finish as if hewn from one block, so it fills all of these seams with silicon-infused bronze welding. The Mulsanne’s ten bronze-filled seams are then hand-sanded with progressively finer grit paper, the last being 600 grit. This is one reason a Mulsanne takes 500 hours to build versus around 200 for a Continental GT. Workers spend 80 to 90 hours alone on the Mulsanne’s body.
4. The Mulsanne is painted largely by hand
All high-volume assembly plants use robot painters. Conversely, the Mulsanne is painted mostly by hand over five days. After the body is dip-cleaned and electro-coated with primer, painters in moon suits spray the color coat. Following an oven curing, workers tape all of the body’s crease lines (to prevent accidental sand-through) and then sand the whole body. Robots apply a clear coat in order to ensure a perfect uniformity of thickness, and then humans set upon the body again. They sand and polish the clear coat to remove any orange peel, the final sand being done with 6000-grit paper, which is basically like being rubbed with a damp sponge. Careful checking under lights shows tiny defects that are then addressed individually. Special colors, matte finishes, and two-tone paint jobs take even longer. In contrast, the Continental and Flying Spur, whose bodies are assembled and painted in Germany, receive less manual labor. They are sanded after the clear coat, but then another robotic clear coat is applied, so they don’t get quite the same scrutiny.
5. The 6.75-liter engine is unique
Because the Mulsanne doesn’t use a VW Group W-12 or V-8, its low-volume engine costs more to produce. The 6.75-liter turbocharged V-8 gets built one by one at the rate of three to four total each day, with a single builder assembling each unit. Engines at AMG are assembled by hand, too, but there, because of the higher volume needs, they are pushed along an assembly line with pre-torqued power tools hanging from the ceiling at the ready. In contrast, the 6.75 comes together more like an F1 engine, in a static workbay where the builder selects tools and parts from a cart.
6. It wallows in wood
The Mulsanne consumes even more wood than Bentley’s other models. The door waist-rails are solid walnut rather than a thin veneer applied over a metal substrate, and they look like parts of a grand piano. Except that those parts are surgically notched so that they break in a predictable pattern in case of a crash. Bentley let us peek into its well-secured veneer room, where stacks of finely sliced burls and hardwoods represent a full year’s worth of supply for the factory. What must be millions of dollars worth of exotic timbers (nine species are available in a Bentley) thrills the senses with its perfumed scent. Wood—supposedly from sustainable sources, Bentley claims—is a hallmark of the brand, the new Continental GT3-R being the first Bentley ever produced without at least some of the stuff. Hence, the woodshop at Crewe is huge. The cutting, forming, and finishing of the wood is a technical process involving laser cutters, computer-controlled milling machines, and robotic sprayers, but eventually workers with large sanding and polishing belts do the final finish.
READ MORE: We Slice Open, Lay Bare Bentley, Audi, and VW Interior Trim
7. It takes a whole lot of leather
Of course, good leather is expensive, but the Mulsanne uses a prodigious amount and wastes a lot of it. The standard Mulsanne consumes 16 South American cattle hides, but only about half the material can actually be used for upholstery owing to natural defects in the leather. Every hide is scanned by a computer, which marks each one for cutting differently so that only the defect-free panels are employed in the stitching. The mostly female upholstery crew feeds the panels through machines by hand. Even a diamond-pleat pattern is stitched manually.
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8: There are limitless choices
A “standard” Mulsanne is practically nonexistent, so the factory has to be highly flexible to handle custom orders, which is the opposite of the cheap, efficient uniformity pioneered by Henry Ford. For example, in Bentley’s finishing area, where the Mulsanne receives a final paint inspection, polish, and wax, a cream-colored Mulsanne 95th Anniversary Edition with red-accented leather complemented by a special blonde walnut trim was being prepped for a customer in Bahrain. A few feet away, a two-tone black/burgundy Mulsanne Majestic, a special-order package that includes badges and additional wood trim, opened up to a scorching all-red interior. It was headed to China. One car serving two completely different cultural preferences by means of a broad options sheet. And all it takes is money.
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