1983 Bentley Mulsanne Turbo on 2040-cars

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Volkswagen breaks 40-year-old sales record in 2012

The last time Volkswagen moved this many vehicles in America in one year, Richard Nixon was still a President in good standing, Let It Be was a radio hit and each car wearing the VW badge boasted an air-cooled engine. That's right, with a grand total of 580,286 vehicles sold in the US last year, the VW Group has broken its own four-decades-old sales record by 2,899 vehicles.
Of that 580k total sold, 438k were Volkswagens and 139k were Audi products - increases of 35.1 percent and 18.5 percent, respectively, in year-over-year sales. The ultra-premium members of the VW group also fared well; Bentley delivered 2,315 vehicles for a 23.3-precent increase, and Lamborghini delivered 520 units for a 52.9-percent jump. Bugatti, we're told is "right on track."
Jetta (pictured) sales paced the marque with 170k models sold, and Passat also finished very strong with sales of 117k total. Tiguan also racked up its best year on file, with 31,731 models shifted.

Bentley SUV spotted wearing its own suit

It's been over two years since Bentley unveiled its first SUV concept at the 2012 Geneva Motor Show. In the time since, Bentley has sent it back to the drawing board and started development, embodied just a couple of weeks ago as a test mule wearing the bodywork of an Audi Q7, the replacement for which will share its underpinnings with the new Bentley. But what we have here is our best look yet at the forthcoming big Bentley.
Now wearing its own suit (albeit a heavily camouflaged one), this Bentley SUV prototype was recently spotted undergoing testing. And judging from the NewBentley.com stickers plastered along its flanks and rear bumpers, it seems like the crew from Crewe wanted us to see it - or at very least has resigned itself to the fact that we probably would.
The prototype is already wearing the new round headlamps that were part of the redesign, as well as LED taillights, and the interior photos snapped through the windows give us an idea of what to expect from the completed cabin, including the digital instrument cluster and head-up display at the base of the windshield.

Bentley shifting W12 engine production to UK

Who would you think would be the largest producer of 12-cylinder engines in the world? Mercedes? BMW? Ferrari? Think again: as you might have guessed from the headline, it's Bentley. The thing is that, while all Bentley automobiles are manufactured in the UK, its engines aren't: while the 6.75-liter V8 in the Mulsanne is made at home, the innovative 6.0-liter twin-turbo W12 engine in Continental models so equipped (like the newer 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8) is shipped in from Germany. But that won't be the case any longer.
Bentley has just announced that production of the W12 engine is moving to its home base in Crewe by the end of this year. The shift in production (which follows the migration of the Flying Spur from Dresden to Crewe in 2007) will create 100 jobs in the UK - a country which employs some 142,000 workers in the automotive sector - and produce as many as 9,000 engines per year. That in and of itself would account for the vast majority of the 10,000-plus cars Bentley made last year, but will also make Bentley an exporter of engines for the first time in its history.
Right there at the factory, Bentley will fit the engines into twelve-cylinder versions of the Continental GT, GTC and Flying Spur, and send some back to Germany for use in the Audi A8. Applications within the Volkswagen brand itself like the Phaeton and Touareg no longer use the W12 engine, but could conceivably use it again in the future - they'll just have to bring them in from England is all.