Here, believe it or not, is the first “woke” Bentley – a car that you can, in theory, drive entirely on renewable resources (albeit not counting the considerable resources required to build this mobile drawing room). It’s a plug-in hybrid with a big petrol engine, which means that you can top up the battery from the mains, at home or, out and about, as well as filling it up with fossil fuels. It also has energy saving tech on board that saves engine-generated energy otherwise wasted in braking, like a Toyota Prius.
To run your Bentley in fully woke mode, however, without any recourse to petrol, you will need to be a very particular kind of driver. It has an electric-only range of about 20 to 25 miles, so if your commute to work or other round trip has the right charging options you might get say 20 miles out of the beast on electric only. You can even find electricity suppliers who’ll make sure your electricity supply is green, or as green as possible, and isn’t fuelling Putin’s war machine. You’ll have to drive very gently, plan ahead, and resist the temptation to see if this near-three tonne baby elephant can be persuaded to dance round corners. Your reward is to pretend you’re enjoying the silent progress of a proper electric car, all the better to appreciate the superb sound system and craftsmanship lavished on your surroundings. You’ll also need to remember to plug it in overnight to get the battery back up to full strength. All that done, your Bentley will be the woke-est car around, though you probably won’t be able to persuade Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil; but if used correctly your plug-in Bentley won’t need to visit a petrol station anyway.
