Bentley’s plant in Crewe, Cheshire, is both the company’s head office and its only car factory. Roughly 4,000 people work on a site that opened in 1938, when Rolls-Royce built it as a shadow factory to produce Merlin aero engines at a safe distance from its Derby works. Car production began after the war, and the first vehicle to leave Crewe was the Bentley Mark VI in 1946.
Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars were built alongside each other here for half a century. The 1998 sale split the two apart: Volkswagen Group bought the Crewe factory and the Bentley marque, while BMW acquired the rights to the Rolls-Royce name and set up separately at Goodwood. Crewe has been Bentley’s alone since, and today it assembles the Continental GT, the Flying Spur and the Bentayga, plus the coachbuilt and limited-run cars from the Mulliner division.
The site also built the 6.75-litre L-series V8, an engine first fitted to the Bentley S2 in 1959 and hand-assembled at Crewe for 61 years. The last one was made in 2020, for the final Mulsanne.
In January 2022 Bentley committed £2.5 billion over ten years to what it calls the Dream Factory programme, rebuilding Crewe around electric production and targeting end-to-end carbon neutrality by 2030. The plant itself has been certified carbon neutral since 2019. The first electric Bentley was originally planned for 2025; it arrives instead as the Torcal, revealed on 23 September 2026 and assembled at Crewe in the oldest building on the site.
