2024 Bentley Batur Is a 740-HP Piece of Glowing Unobtainium

Cryogenics might require a room full of doctors and scientists, but squeeze a $2.1 million Bentley Batur down the narrow lanes of Spain’s Canary Islands, and you’ll freeze every tourist and highway worker stiff. A Batur, which is designed to look like a resting predator, is a sight worth savoring. The two prototypes we drove for an afternoon through Tenerife are the start of a production run that will see only 18 built. Bentley is using the Batur to celebrate the brand’s legendary 12-cylinder engine as its departure draws near and tease what its eventual electric cars will look like.

The Batur’s limited run will make other multimillion-dollar machines, such as the 99 Pagani Utopias, 130 Lotus Evijas, and the 300-unit Koenigsegg Gemera, look almost commonplace. And the Batur won’t be street-legal in the U.S. However, just because the Batur is something few people on the planet will ever witness doesn’t mean it’s completely unique. Under the bespoke Mulliner coachwork, it shares the majority of its mechanical bits with more attainable Bentleys, chiefly the Continental GT Speed. That includes the rear-biased all-wheel drive, the 48-volt active anti-roll bars, and the rear-wheel-steering system first introduced on the Flying Spur.

Outside, the Batur’s windshield is the biggest exterior element that carries over from the Continental GT. Pretty much every piece of sheetmetal from the roofline on down is new. The Batur’s fenders and quarter-panels are carbon fiber and are molded to the aluminum roof. The headlight assemblies are exclusive to the Batur, rather than pulled from any other Bentley. To pass your hand across its finish is to have touched something few people will ever even lay eyes on. Mulliner, which is a British way to say hand-built, spends roughly eight months creating each Batur in the same workshop in Crewe, England, where the open-roof 12-unit Bacalar was built.

The twin-turbocharged 6.0-liter W-12 engine is an old relative of the one that debuted in the 2002 Volkswagen Phaeton sedan. The Batur’s W-12 is the most powerful that Bentley has ever made—or ever will. Bentley’s engineers gave the brand’s legendary powerplant revised turbines with more aggressive compressor wheels inside to shovel oxygen into improved intake manifolds. These upgrades have wrought 740 horsepower at 5500 rpm and 738 pound-feet of torque starting at 1750 rpm. Bentley says the top speed is 209 mph, and the Batur swallows Spanish highway as effortlessly as tourists ingest the islands’ rum.

Although we passed huge banana plantations, the Batur was the most bananas thing on the Canary Islands. It was the biggest car we saw in Tenerife as we chased down Fiat 500 rentals, catching up to them like they were mice stuck in a glue trap.

It takes a brief moment to wake the eight-speed dual-clutch automatic from its slumber, but then the power is delivered like a tidal wave. Spilling out of corners with the aggression of a hungry cat, the Batur quickly overwhelms the 315/30ZR-22 Pirelli P Zero PZ4 rubber under its tail. Outsize carbon-ceramic brakes (17.3-inch front rotors with 10-piston calipers and 16.1-inch rears grasped by four-piston calipers) effortlessly haul the Batur back down again.

The interior is equally dramatic. One car we drove featured trim that fades from carbon fiber to body-color-matching Purple Sector trim. There’s a long list of available materials inside, none cheap. The edge of the drive-mode dial doesn’t just spin with the sophistication of an expensive wristwatch; it’s decorated with a 3-D-printed 18-karat-gold surround. The knurling at the edge of the windshield-wiper stalk is too sharp to be anything other than titanium. Only the detailers of private car collections may notice this hidden piece: The arm attached to the brake pedal is made of bare carbon fiber.

While the W-12 will soon be gone, Bentley also looks to the future, with plans to go all electric by 2030. The front fascia of the Batur, we’re told, is a peek at what Bentley’s EV will look like. Like the glowing sunset across the ocean surrounding the Canary Islands, it’s easy to stare at the Batur and imagine, Ah, wouldn’t it be nice. Whether a fully electric Bentley can summon those same feelings is yet to be seen.