This electric three-door EXP 15 with a dog bed is the future of Bentley – unless you hate it

Welcome to Bentley’s experimental phase. This isn’t going to please the traditional purists one bit.

But it's steaming towards some very tricky questions. Bentley is the master of continent-gobbling coupes and has successfully ridden the uberluxe SUV wave, but what happens next to the traditional saloon (or sedan)? How to replace the Flying Spur, which succeeded the Mulsanne, and Arnage?

Should it be… taller? Offer lopsided doors? Change shape altogether? And how does Bentley stay, well, ‘Bentleyish’, when it begins building EVs? Those ideas and more all collide in this new concept car dubbed EXP 15. Yowser.

First, let’s address the shape. The ride height is much loftier than a regular saloon but the cabin is swept back like an Audi A7’s. Are we to understand that tomorrow’s Flying Spur will become some sort of coupefied crossover? Bentley’s design director Robin Page explains the logic behind the unorthodox silhouette thusly: “The beauty of a concept car is not just to position our new design language, but to test where the market's going.

"It’s clear that SUVs are a growing segment and we understand the GT market but the trickiest segment is the sedan because it’s changing. Some customers want a classic ‘three-box’ sedan shape, others a ‘one-box’ design, and others again something more elevated. So this was a chance for us to talk to people and get a feeling.”

Obviously aero has a lot to do with this. That matters when you’re going electric. Bentley’s designers have gilded the car with twin active roof spoilers and a diffuser to aid range. The wheels are shrouded in flush covers. You need a slippery shape when batteries are the new W12s.

The EXP 15 is imagined as an AWD electric automobile, though no estimated battery size, range or performance is quoted. But you can bet Bentley boffins are sweating exactly that right now, ahead of the company’s commitment to launch its first pure EV at the close of next year (a ‘luxury urban SUV’ is promised – oh goodie) and be an entirely engine-free marque by 2035.

Bentley, like Rolls-Royce, Audi and Mercedes, is in the awkward position of having built up decades of design DNA that doesn’t translate especially well into EVs. Sit-up-and-beg visages wreck the drag coefficient. Why carry around a massive grille when there’s no engine to cool, at the end of a massive bonnet which houses fresh air?

So they’ve rebranded the family silver: the grille becomes an illuminated art installation in the only slightly tapered nose. The vast bonnet houses piano-cover hinged compartments for stowing one’s fitted luggage. A smart idea, but most front-motored EVs barely offer a froot that could carry a bunch of grapes. Will Bentley be able to innovate around that?

Front and centre, the winged B logo has had its feathers sharpened up – it’s only the fourth time in Bentley’s 106 years they’ve dared to dabble with the badge.

It’s decisions like the LED strip-lighting front and rear that jar. Is that truly distinctive enough? Or perhaps a case of 'we don’t need to make our car recognisable at night because the badges all light up and spell it out for us'.

It’s more menacing than the almost surprised-looking expressions of the Mulsanne and Flying Spur, but for us the Bentleyness has been sacrificed along the way, in favour of a lighting signature that any one of the Chinese upstarts could’ve scrawled.

Bentley insists the EXP 15 is dripping with classic cues from the Speed Six ‘Blue Train’ special of 1930. Apparently they come in the form of the ‘endless’ bonnet line that runs from the tip of the nose and along the car’s shoulder, the upright grille, the rearward cabin, pumped rear haunches, and the three-seater interior.

The last idea is built on sound logic: Bentleys are bought by people who like to drive themsleves and occasionally be driven. The least important seat in the car is the front passenger’s, so it’s been dispensed with in favour of a pampered pet bed.

The passenger-side seat then has room to recline, and indeed swivel for easier egress when the rear passenger coach door is opened. Don’t go looking for the same trick on the driver’s side – the EXP 15 is asymmetric. One-door coupe to the right, two-door saloon to the left. Who knew the Hyundai Veloster was actually onto something?

Up front the Bentley wings are echoed in the dashboard shape and Bentley shreds the concept car rulebook by fitting physical switchgear, conscious their customers (like the rest of us) are sick of the giant smartphone act and actually enjoy twiddling a knurled metal switch from time to time. Even the charging indicator is a mechanical artefact, encased in glass like something Tom Cruise would have to steal in Mission Impossible 17: Electro-Heist Protocol.

As of right now Bentley is the undisputed interior design master: everything from the material quality to the balance of touchscreen media with tactile controls is unmatched in the industry. Perhaps there are clues here that particular baby isn’t being lobbed out with the bathwater.

And let’s not overlook that Bentley gets its big, controversial calls right. Sharing a platform with a Volkswagen saloon did the original Continental GT no harm at all back in 2003. It became the best-selling Bentley ever.

Today’s arch money-printer is the Bentayga, which was itself previewed by a much-maligned EXPerimetal car: the EXP 9F was unveiled in 2012 to gasps and birds falling out of the sky stone-dead. To modern eyes accustomed to all these ultra-4x4s it’s nothing offensive, but Bentley insiders at the time admitted they’d gone a tad overboard with their Strange Rover. Feedback was vitriolic and the production car was redrawn, and sold bucketloads.

Question is, has Bentley got the looks of its brave new world right first time on this occasion?