The handcrafted car at 99: Bentley enters its 100th year

Luxury car brand Bentley, which started its journey on January 18, 1919, completes 99 years - carrying the world's rich and famous, including royalty. Founded by Walter Owen Bentley, known as W.O., the company and its cars have certainly travelled far as its founder and owner later became its employee when Bentley was bought by Rolls Royce, which itself was sold to Vickers, which eventually sold it to Volkswagen in 1998.

Till 1940, all Bentley cars were delivered only as rolling chassis to their customers, who in turn had to get them customised from coachbuilders, who fitted them with a body of the customer's choice - much like how buses are built in India. This idea of only supplying chassis came to Bun, as W.O. was also known in his early years, from his car dealership of the French company, Doriot, Flandrin & Parant (DFP).

Bentley always had a chequered history with money. It was first bailed out by Woolf Barnato, a South African diamond mining heir in 1926, who lost interest within five years, sending the company into the arms of Rolls Royce, which bought it for 125,275 through a front company, making W O an employee of Rolls Royce - his service lasting till 1935.

The company produces 62 cars a day of different models, with 50 per cent of them being Bentaygas. The company delivered 11,023 cars in 2016 to its customers, of the 11,817 produced, earning 1.8 billion in revenue, with an operating profit of 99.3 million.

Each model of Bentley takes different time to build, from start to finish. While a Mulsanne takes 400 hours, a Flying Spur and a Bentayga take 130 hours, while the Continental GT takes 110 hours. The upholstery and interiors of a Mulsanne requires 15 bull hides, while a Bentayga consumes 14 bull hides, followed by the Flying Spur, which requires 13. Among the Continental models, while GT Coup requires hides of 11 bulls, the GT Convertible makes do with 10 bulls' hides.

In 2016, the Bentley produced 5,586 units of the Bentayga, 2,272 units of the Continental GT Coup, 1,731 units of the Flying Spur, 1,600 units of the Continental GT Convertible and 628 units of the Mulsanne. Given the number of bulls whose hide is required for each model, that's a total of 151,119 bulls whose hides were used for the interiors of all the models.

The first Bentleys to roll off the factory floor were fitted with the flying Bentley logo - a pair of flowing wings flanking a silver letter B. To differentiate various models, according to the purposes they were built for, W.O. also affixed an enamel badge in different colours - red representing speed and green representing sporty models. After its acquisition by Rolls Royce in 1931, all badges were changed to black on chrome, with the B in white.