The Bentley Bentayga is a mid-size, front-engine, all-wheel drive, five-door luxury crossover marketed by Bentley, beginning with model year 2016. Its body is manufactured at the Volkswagen Zwickau-Mosel plant, then painted by Paintbox Editions in Banbury, and finally assembled at the company’s Crewe factory.
An evolution of the 2012 Bentley EXP 9 F concept car, the production Bentayga debuted at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 2015 as Bentley’s first SUV — using unibody construction and full-time all-wheel drive as well as Volkswagen Group’s bi-turbo W12 engine and MLB platform, the latter shared with the second-generation Audi Q7 and the third-generation Porsche Cayenne, Audi Q8, and Lamborghini Urus.
Available in seating configurations for four, five or seven, the Bentayga was claimed by the manufacturer as the SUV which has the highest top speed 187 mph (301 km/h) as well as the second most expensive production SUV.
The “Bentayga” name has two origins; one comes from “Roque Bentayga”, an emblematic highland rock situated in massif central Gran Canaria, in the Canary Islands; the other one comes from a portmanteau of Bentley and Taiga, the world’s largest transcontinental snow forest.