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An EV that sounds like a 6.75 L V8: A ride in the Bentley Torcal

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Technology Desk

After benchmarking some competitors, Bentley decided to dig into its archive instead, “and we came back to the engines out of the Continental and Turbo; quite a heavy, low-revving, high-torque [engine],” he said. There’ll be over 850 PS [838 hp/625 kW], but we’re not chasing four figures,” said Martin Page, product line director for the Torcal.

The sound is mapped to the amount of load on the powertrain “so that you get a really natural experience when you’re in a high load scenario, up a hill or in a dynamic situation where you get that visceral level of kind of engagement with the car,” Page said.

And that’s been the kind of guiding principle throughout, is that access to it,” Page said as he drove us around Pebble Beach in a preproduction car that has been here in the US doing localization testing. So they have natural imperfections in the way they have gone through the percussion,” he said.

And that’s part of the character of the car that we put in,” Page said. “We chose to use artists, humans to recreate the pattern,” Page said.

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