Talking With Wolfgang Durheimer, CEO of Bentley

So far, I've only driven a car at 233 mph," says Wolfgang Durheimer, the new boss of Bentley and Bugatti. "So 250 mph is still a target."

For most 52-year-old car company bosses, 233 mph would be fast enough. However, Durheimer is no ordinary car company boss. He's the man carefully chosen by Volkswagen's board of management to take over the two brands that make their fastest cars, to improve them and to make them profitable.

He is also the man who previously spent 12 years at Porsche making the 911 go and sell better, and before that set BMW's motorcycle division on the road to making performance bikes rather than safe choices for old men.

For Durheimer, who has an athlete's build and the clear-eyed vigor of a man half his age, only the full 250 mph is ever going to be enough. And especially so, since it is the exact top speed of his new performance flagship, the Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport. He has to finish that job before Bugatti can proceed with its latest project, building the awesome Galibier four-door sedan that stunned the world when it appeared as a concept ahead of the Frankfurt show a couple of years ago.

Big Shoes To Fill
Durheimer took over at the beginning of the year from the venerable Franz-Josef Paefgen, former head of Audi, who has run the two companies since the early 2000s. The new chief has taken a few months to brief teams and formulate new business plans for the two companies, which he will present for board approval in the next couple of months.

First he must negotiate the launch of the reworked Continental GTC. Meanwhile, bursting with energy for the tasks ahead, he has started talking in public about a wide assumption that Bentley's third model line will be an SUV. "It could be an SUV," he corrects me when I make the assumption at the beginning of our talk. Clearly Durheimer has realized (possibly with the help of his PR chief, also just arrived from Porsche) that media assumptions are running a little ahead of the all-powerful board's approval.

When we introduced the idea of an SUV at Porsche, people said we were mad," he says with a grin.

Yet the former Porsche boss has experience as a promoter of SUVs. The Porsche Cayenne was hatched on his watch, and now turns bigger annual sales than the Boxster and 911 combined. "When we introduced the idea of an SUV at Porsche, people said we were mad," he says with a grin. "But it seems to have worked."

Yes, a Bentley SUV
I am already learning that one of Durheimer's most engaging characteristics is that he simply can't contain his enthusiasm for exciting, new projects. After a minute, we're back on the subject of a Bentley SUV. "When I was at Porsche, we assessed all the current SUVs on sale," he says, "so I already know the market very well. I believe there is room for a very expensive Bentley SUV above everything else — above them for power, luxury, exclusivity and price, but not necessarily size. We are already deeply into making a business case for it."

I make an immediate connection with the next Range Rover, which, a year from launch, is expected to reach considerably farther into the pricing stratosphere than the current models that top out at just over $100K. So I suggest $150K for the Bentley, which seems a nice, round figure.

But the Bentley boss demurs. "When the Cayenne came out, it was only the same price as a 911," he says. "This is not a clue to what we'll do, it is just to curb your expectation that a Bentley SUV would have to be priced above the Continental."

The model will be designed in Crewe, using appropriate Porsche/VW hardware and software. Exactly where its body is to be made has still to be decided, Durheimer says. However, while at Porsche he led the design of the Volkswagen Group's front-engine/rear-drive modular platform, code-named MSB, already used for the Porsche Panamera and ideal for parallel group projects like a new VW Phaeton or Bentley Continental.

It seems a fair bet that the new SUV and next-generation Contis will have MSB-derived bodies-in-white made in the VW plant in Leipzig. It's all still being decided, Durheimer says, but we should know the truth quite soon. Insiders say the group wants its new SUV in showrooms for 2015.

First Priority: Make Money
Durheimer summarizes his mission as "to get Bentley back to a very successful market position, to make more of it, and above all to make money." The company's best ever sales volume was just under 10,000 cars, but last year it managed only around 5,000 units. This year it is striving for 7,000. If the world economy doesn't worsen, says Durheimer, the company should be able to hit 10,000 quite soon and start making money.

Chinese demand keeps expanding, and the current crop of 15 Chinese dealers is due to expand to 20 by the end of the year. Bentley is learning fast about China, says the new boss. Whereas Europeans expect to order new luxury cars to a precise specification and are willing to wait for delivery, wealthy Chinese demand to buy immediately, straight off the showroom floor. They also like cars Westerners would call garish in color and trim, so Durheimer has started building what his predecessors would have called very risky cars and gambling that they'll sell. "We will need to maintain a stock of around 60 cars in China," he says. "You have to do it that way, otherwise you find your customer goes off and buys a Ferrari — that afternoon."

Respect for the Past, Excitement for the Future
Luckily, in this brave, new world, Durheimer does not feel in the least bit constrained by the past. He is full of respect for the achievements of his predecessor, who arranged the traumatic separation from Rolls-Royce and then successfully brought the current range into the world.

But where Paefgen loved Bentley's "heritage cars," Durheimer merely respects them. He looks forward, not back. "I'm the boss now," he says. "I feel free to do what I want." One thing he most definitely wants to do is take Bentley back into racing. But Durheimer has been told that before he can make Bentley a big name in racing again, he has to start making sustainable profits.

The cars from Crewe won Le Mans in 2003 while Audi was taking a break, but Audi has dominated La Sarthe since, and now Porsche has announced a return for 2014. On the premise that group marques probably wouldn't fight one another on the track, Durheimer knows he may have to find other ways for racing his cars than LMP1, perhaps by using Continentals in the GT classes and developing them in the same way as Porsche has done with the 911. "We won't necessarily race all the time," he says, "but we would need a long-term plan to be successful. We'll also work on a customer race program.

Is Bentley Still Exclusive?
In all this talk of expansion, does Durheimer worry about any loss of Bentley exclusivity? "Not at all," he replies robustly. "Our new markets — Russia, China, other parts of Asia — are spreading our production around the world. Our cars are rare, a face in the crowd. But in any case, we already have 25 percent of the U.K. luxury car market, and nobody says we're not exclusive. I believe that even if we were making 30,000 cars a year there'd still be no problem. Not that this is likely to happen in the short term."

Durheimer has already settled well into the job, people say. He says the offer to run Bentley and Bugatti came as a complete surprise, something he neither expected nor applied for. But he didn't take long to accept, he says, and plans to play the long game. "I was 14 years at BMW and 12 years at Porsche," he says. "I'm definitely more than just a one-night stand."

Portions of this content have appeared in foreign print media and are reproduced with permission.