This is the very last 6.0-litre W12 engine Bentley will ever make

This is the very last W12 engine Bentley will ever build, marking an end to the venerable 6.0-litre’s long, long service.

You knew it was coming. Bentley long ago revealed it would cease production of the W12 as it – and the wider car world around it – moves into the exciting, shiny new electric future. Yes, it could have probably kept it going for a bit longer, but time waits for no-one, and all that.

So now we come to the very final W12, hand-built in Crewe as always, and the last of more than 100,000 W12 engines carefully assembled by Bentley since 2003. You’ll remember 2003. The year The Darkness released I Believe In A Thing Called Love, of course! And the launch of the first Bentley Continental GT.

Essentially a pair of narrow-angle V6s strapped together with extra-grippy sticky tape, those early W12s punched out 552bhp – a far cry from the engine’s genesis, a 360bhp tentative outing in an old Audi A8 – before later shooting up to 600bhp, and finally 650bhp in Speed trim.

While power galloped ahead over two decades (and CO2 emissions came down by 25 per cent), Bentley is acutely aware of the original’s impact.

“The engine’s introduction helped change the face of the company almost overnight and so will go down in history as a true gamechanger,” said Bentley’s manufacturing board member Andreas Lehe, “and we should feel proud to have designed, developed and manufactured such an icon in Britain for such a long period of time.”

So, off it goes, into the twilight of the purely combustion-engined era of Bentley Motors, making way for an electrified V8 called ‘Ultra High Performance Hybrid’. It is indeed Ultra High: initial figures confirm the V8 will produce more than 740bhp. Which is a lot.

It’ll also do a lot of service, because Bentley has also confirmed the hybrid V8 will be available across the range.