Bentley profits head towards €600m as rich seek personalised cars 

A Bentley car is already a pricey item, with prices topping €300,000. But the wealthiest buyers need more. One buyer ordered a bespoke, one-off car with a sticker price of €2m. 

The luxury carmaker Bentley is cashing in as more of the world’s richest people opt to spend hundreds of thousands of euro on “levels of personalisation that we’ve never seen before”, the company has said.

While households all over the world struggle with inflation and the continued impact of the global energy crisis, its chief executive, Adrian Hallmark, said “our customers can still afford our cars”, even if some were hesitating before committing.

On the whole, the weaker global economy has passed by many luxury car buyers, as the world’s super-rich prove willing to pay enormous sums on customising their vehicles to set themselves apart from the merely very wealthy.

“In the old days it would be one person in Brunei,” said Hallmark, referring to the small but oil-rich kingdom. However, the carmaker is finding increasing interest from all over the world in a game of global one-upmanship.

That helped the company, owned by Germany’s Volkswagen, make operating profits of €589m — its second best ever after 2022 — on sales of €2.9bn in 2023, according to financial results published on Tuesday. 

It delivered 13,560 cars in 2023, its third-highest retail figure in history.

A Bentley car is already a pricey item, with prices topping €300,000. But the wealthiest buyers need more. One buyer ordered a bespoke, one-off car with a sticker price of €2m. 

On top of that, Bentley has quoted another €400,000 of options that “we never even thought of” to create “jaw-droppers”, Hallmark said — such as racy carbon fibre to replace metal components.

In practice, relatively few car buyers are able to resist fancy add-ons, even on cheaper cars. Hallmark said his customers spend tens of thousands of euro extra on features such as different colour leather, hand stitching in coloured thread, “jewel fuel caps” and “exotic and sustainable” materials.

Bentley is not the only luxury carmaker that is pushing personalised options to extravagant levels. Its rival Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, owned by Germany’s BMW, has previously made a car with a paint job containing 1,000 crushed diamonds , and another with a night sky recreated on the roof with LED lights.

• Guardian