Bentley has built an automobile that no longer needs to make a noise. Then decided, rather wonderfully, that perhaps it should make one after all.
By David Mason.
The Bentley Torcal
Credit: Bentley Motors
For almost a century, we have had a convenient expression for progress.
"The greatest thing since sliced bread".
It is worth considering, however, whether sliced bread was actually such a great idea.
The first commercially sliced loaf appeared in Chillicothe, Missouri, in 1928, accompanied by the magnificent claim that it represented “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.”
Chillicothe, Missouri: The Home of Sliced Bread.
Credit: Chillicote Baking Co.
There is something pleasingly modest about this hierarchy of human achievement.
First we wrapped the loaf.
Then we sliced it.
Where could civilisation possibly go from there?
Kleen Maid Sliced Bread advertisement (1928).
Credit: Chillicothe Baking Co.
By the 1930s, bakers were already advertising subsequent innovations as the newest thing “since sliced bread”.
Then, the expression escaped from the bakery and embraced human form.
In 1951, American journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, writing about British actor Stewart Granger following his starring role in King Solomon’s Mines, quoted her sister, talent agent Eleanor Kilgallen, declaring: “He is the greatest thing since sliced bread!”
The greatest thing since sliced bread: Stewart Granger with Deborah Kerr in King Solomon’s Mines (1950).
Credit: TCD / Prod.DB
Sliced bread had become the benchmark for progress.
It was so popular that when the United States government banned commercial bread slicing during the Second World War — partly in an attempt to conserve the waxed paper required to keep the exposed slices fresh — the American public revolted.
No more sliced bread (16 May 1943).
Credit: The Daily Herald
The ban lasted less than two months.
People, it transpired, were quite prepared to make sacrifices for the war effort.
Slicing their own bread was apparently a sacrifice too far.
Which brings us, somewhat improbably, to the new Bentley.
This week, Bentley unveiled the Torcal, its first fully electric motor car.
Bentley's first electric motor car unveiled (23 September 2026).
Credit: Bentley Motors
There are all the numbers one expects from such an announcement: prodigious horsepower, startling acceleration, considerable range and the ability to replenish its batteries remarkably quickly.
But there is another number missing.
Cylinders.
And with them goes something else.
Noise.
So Bentley has put it back.
The sound of Bentley, crafted for emotion.
Credit: Bentley Motors
To create the Torcal's soundtrack, Bentley employed musicians to give voice to a motor car that, mechanically speaking, has very little need to make one. Their performance even retains its tiny imperfections. In the words of Bentley CEO Frank-Steffen Walliser, the intention is to put some “emotion” back into the experience.
There is something deliciously circular about this.
For more than a century, motor-car engineers have devoted enormous ingenuity to eliminating noise and vibration. Engines became smoother. Transmissions quieter. Soundproofing more efficient.
The Roaring Twenties. Speed over silence. Woolf Barnato and Tim Birkin at Le Mans in 1929, powering the No. 1 Bentley Speed Six to the marque’s fourth victory.
Credit: Shawshots
The electric motor finally arrives and does away with the din.
And we decide we rather miss it.
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.
A machine can sew a more regular buttonhole than a tailor. Yet order a bespoke suit and somebody may still spend a considerable amount of time sewing yours by hand.
Perfectly imperfect. The hand-sewn buttonhole.
Credit: The Transatlantic Journal
Look closely and it won't be absolutely perfect.
That's rather the point.
Likewise, modern shirtmaking can produce a collar of almost architectural regularity. Yet enthusiasts of the Oxford button-down obsess over something considerably less precise: the roll.
Roll with it. Gianni Agnelli demonstrates why the perfect button-down collar should never look too perfect (1974).
Credit: Max Scheler/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo
A soft collar moves. It changes with washing and wearing. One side may not behave quite like the other.
Nobody who understands the shirt wants to iron the character out of it.
And then there is the mechanical watch — an exquisitely complicated and ruinously expensive device for performing a task that a £20 quartz watch can accomplish more accurately.
It's complicated. The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Double Balance Wheel Openworked turns the mechanical movement into the main attraction.
Credit: Audemars Piguet
We could go on.
But perhaps the point is already made.
This isn't an argument against progress, nor a plea for bad workmanship.
It is simply that perfection and excellence are not always the same thing.
Perfection eliminates variation.
Excellence can accommodate it.
Which presents an interesting problem for the electric motor car.
The internal-combustion engine produces heat, noise and vibration. It requires lubrication, cooling, exhausts, gearboxes and hundreds of moving parts. From a purely engineering point of view, much of this is undesirable.
But somewhere along the way those undesirable elements became character.
A V8 didn't sound like a V12. A Ferrari didn't sound like a Bentley. An air-cooled Porsche could announce itself before it appeared around the corner.
The last of the air-cooled. The 993-generation Porsche 911 bowed out in 1998. Its successor was cleaner, quieter and more efficient. Not everyone considered that progress.
Credit: Porsche AG
The imperfections became identities.
Luxury, meanwhile, seems to have undergone a curious reversal.
It once meant removing inconvenience.
The chauffeur saved you from driving. The automatic gearbox saved you from changing gear. The quartz movement saved you from winding your watch. The bread slicer saved you from taking a knife to the loaf.
The greatest thing before sliced bread. A line-up of chauffeurs in 1926, when luxury meant leaving the driving to somebody else.
Credit: Underwood Archives
Today, luxury increasingly involves putting the inconvenience back in.
We drive the car ourselves.
We wind the watch.
We commission the hand-sewn buttonhole.
We cultivate the collar roll.
And increasingly, we buy the unsliced loaf.
Not because these things necessarily work better.
Because they make us feel something.
Made by hand. The Torcal may be an electric vehicle, but the human touch remains part of its production at Bentley’s Crewe factory.
Credit: Bentley Motors
Bentley has now created a motor car that no longer needs to make the noises Bentleys have made for more than a century.
And then decided that perhaps it should make a noise after all.
Maybe that tells us more about the future of the motor car than horsepower, range or charging times ever could.
For the coming argument may not really be between the internal combustion engine and the electric motor.
It may be between perfection and personality.
Perhaps, in trying to have our bread buttered on both sides — all the perfection of the new, with all the personality of the old — we have discovered something rather important.
After nearly a century of measuring progress against a pre-cut loaf, perhaps it is time to reconsider the expression.
The greatest things, after all, aren't always perfect.