Bentley Launches New Bentayga With Inspired Rear Seats (Photos)

Bentley stretches its Bentayga to create a £180k SUV limo with airline-inspired rear seats that automatically adjust for best posture.

Bentley is today launching a stretch version of its best-selling Bentayga model that bosses say delivers first-class airline levels of comfort.

Priced from around £180,000 – but likely to exceed £300,000 for the most highly specced versions – the new Bentayga Extended Wheelbase (EWB) is designed to improve wellness and well-being for passengers and leave them arriving at their destinations more refreshed than when they set off.

This means it gets the creature comforts of airline-style reclining seats, posture massages, and enhanced interior air quality – from what is claimed as the world’s first climate sensing system – designed to enhance comfort within the cabin of what it calls its grand-touring SUV.

A stretch too far? This is the new Bentley Bentayga Extended Wheelbase, which brings limo-like comfort to the brand’s 2.5-tonned SUV

Pricing is broadly 15 percent above the equivalent conventional-length Bentayga. First deliveries are expected from autumn this year. Bentley says the EWB is ‘so much more than just a stretch’ and ‘the best rear cabin experience since a Mulsanne’.

Designed for well-heeled owners who will be chauffeured rather than driving themselves, it will be sold at launch with a burbling 4.0-liter twin-turbocharged V8 under the bonnet.

Linked to an eight-speed automatic gearbox, it produces a massive 550 horsepower and can catapult this opulent vehicle and its deep-pocketed occupants from rest to 60mph in just 4.5 seconds and to 100mph – where legal – in 10 seconds, with a top speed of 180mph.

A more frugal 3.0-liter V6 plug-in hybrid version is likely to follow but has not yet been confirmed.

For enhanced cornering, the EWB – which tips the scales at two and a quarter – also features electronic all-wheel steering to navigate tight corners and narrow inner-city streets, which was first introduced by Bentley on the new Flying Spur.