Who Owns Bentley? Bentley History, Explained: Cricklewood, Crewe and the Volkswagen Years

Bentley, in eleven dates	When	What it changed
W.O. Bentley founds Bentley Motors in London	1919	The 3-litre prototype is shown at the London Motor Show that November.
First production Bentley delivered	Sept 1921	Built in Cricklewood, north London. £1,050 to its first owner.
Le Mans wins	1924, 1927–30	Five in seven years, and the first four places in 1929.
Rolls-Royce takes Bentley over	Nov 1931	After receivership that July. Production moves to Derby.
Production moves to Crewe	1946	The Mark VI is the first car out of the factory. Bentley has built there since.
Volkswagen buys Bentley and Crewe	3 July 1998	The end of 67 years with Rolls-Royce. BMW takes the Rolls-Royce name.
Continental GT; a sixth Le Mans win	2003	The first car of the modern Bentley era.
Bentayga launched	2015	Bentley’s first SUV and its fourth model line.
Audi takes over management of Bentley	1 Mar 2021	Inside the Volkswagen Group.
Bentley joins the Audi Group	Jan 2022	Brand Group Progressive: Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini, Ducati.
Cars built in Crewe in 2025	10,428	About 4,000 people work there, and every model is built there.

The Bentley you can drive this week Bentley Bentayga Built in Crewe, black with a cream cabin, and quiet enough at freeway speed to hold a conversation in a whisper. $999 a day. Dates and rate →

Who owns Bentley today?

Bentley Motors belongs to the Volkswagen Group. It has since 3 July 1998, and since January 2022 it has been part of the Audi Group inside it.

The Volkswagen Group’s own history of the brand gives the date: on 3 July 1998 the Wolfsburg company acquired the Bentley brand and the Crewe factory, together with the right to use the Rolls-Royce name until the end of 2002. Audi’s 2026 fact sheet on Bentley gives the rest: Audi took over management responsibility for Bentley on 1 March 2021, and since January 2022 Bentley has been part of what Volkswagen calls the Brand Group Progressive, with Audi, Lamborghini and Ducati. The same sheet says Volkswagen has invested more than £1 billion in the Crewe production facilities since it bought them.

So “who makes Bentley cars?” has a one-word answer, Bentley, and a one-line answer: Bentley Motors Limited, of Crewe, a subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group managed through Audi. The Bentayga, the Continental and the Flying Spur are built by Bentley’s own people in England, and since Audi took charge, joint Audi and Bentley teams have shared research and development. That is also why Bentley and Lamborghini now report to the same place, while Rolls-Royce, the company Bentley spent most of the twentieth century inside, belongs to BMW.

Who founded Bentley, and when?

Walter Owen Bentley, always W.O., founded the company in 1919. He was born in 1888 and started out on the railway at sixteen; in 1912 he set up a business importing French cars, and his idea of an aluminium piston in place of the usual cast iron went into British aero engines during the First World War. Bentley’s parent dates the company to 10 July 1919 (Volkswagen’s own history says January of that year, in London); the three-litre prototype was shown at the London Motor Show that November, and the factory was a small one in Cricklewood, in north London.

It took nearly two years more to sell one. Bentley’s own heritage page records that the first production Bentley left the factory in September 1921 and was delivered to its owner, Noel van Raalte, for £1,050. It had a three-litre, 85 bhp engine and would do 80 mph. W.O.’s brief to himself survives in the same place, and it has outlived every model since: “a fast car, a good car, the best in its class.” He died in August 1971, aged 82, by which time his name had belonged to somebody else for forty years.

Bentley at Le Mans: the Bentley Boys and five wins

The reputation was made at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Bentley won it in 1924, 1927, 1928, 1929 and 1930, five times in seven years, and in 1929 the cars took the first four places. The drivers were a loose set of wealthy amateurs and racing men, the Bentley Boys, and they are why the marque is still associated with speed in a way its old partner never was. Bentley came back to the race with Volkswagen’s money and won it again in 2003, a sixth win recorded in Wikipedia’s history of the company.

Racing did not pay the bills. The cars that won were expensive to build and the customers were few, and when the Depression arrived the company had nothing left to absorb it.

The Rolls-Royce years, 1931 to 1998

Bentley Motors went into receivership in July 1931, and in November 1931 Rolls-Royce, its fiercest rival, took it over. The winning bid came from a trust that later proved to be a front for Rolls-Royce. Production moved to the Rolls-Royce works in Derby, and from then until the end of the century the two marques shared chassis, engines and, for long stretches, whole cars with different grilles; Wikipedia’s summary is that every Bentley built from 1931 to 2004 used an inherited or shared Rolls-Royce chassis and an adapted Rolls-Royce engine.

There were good Bentleys in those years. The Mark VI of 1946 was the first car out of the Crewe factory, and Bentley’s heritage page calls the R-Type Continental of 1952 a Mulliner-bodied coupe with a top speed of just under 120 mph, which made it the fast car W.O. had promised. But for most of the period the Bentley was the sportier-badged sibling of a Rolls-Royce, and in some decades barely that.

The split came in 1998, when Vickers, which owned Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, sold the business. Volkswagen bought it, with Bentley and Crewe, but the Rolls-Royce name belonged to the aero-engine company, which licensed it to BMW. Bentley’s heritage page puts it simply: Bentley and Rolls-Royce would be separate companies once again, “after 67 years together.” The Bentley was freed to be a Bentley, and the 2003 Continental GT is what it chose to be.

Where are Bentleys made?

Crewe, in Cheshire, England. The factory on Pyms Lane was built in 1938 as a wartime shadow factory for aero engines; the first car, a Mark VI, left it in 1946, and Bentley has built there ever since. Audi’s fact sheet says it is where all Bentley models are built, with about 4,000 people, and that it produced 10,428 cars in 2025. The current lines are the Continental, the Flying Spur and the Bentayga, with Mulliner, the coachbuilder Bentley has worked with since 1923, building the small-series cars alongside them.

That matters for the “where are Bentley cars built” question in a way it would not for most brands. Volkswagen did not move Bentley to Germany; it put more than a billion pounds into Crewe instead.

Is Bentley German or British?

British, with a German owner. Bentley was founded in London, raced for Britain at Le Mans, spent sixty-seven years inside a British company and is built in an English town by its own workforce. It belongs to the Volkswagen Group of Wolfsburg, and its management line runs through Audi. Both halves are true at once, and neither cancels the other.

The same is true of almost every name at this level now. Rolls-Royce is British and owned by BMW; Lamborghini is Italian and owned, like Bentley, through Audi. What a Bentley is, in the sense people mean when they ask “what is a Bentley?”, has not changed much since W.O.: a large, fast, hand-finished British car meant to be driven by its owner rather than from the back seat. That last part is the line between Bentley and Rolls-Royce, and it is the one worth knowing before choosing between them.

The Bentley you can drive in Los Angeles: the Bentayga

The Bentayga was Bentley’s answer to a question W.O. never had to ask: what a Bentley should be when it has to carry five people and their luggage over every kind of road. Bentley launched it in 2015 as its first SUV and its fourth model line, and it is built in Crewe alongside the Continental. The name joins Roque Bentayga, a rock on Gran Canaria, to the taiga, and what Bentayga means, and how it sits against the dearest Bentleys, has its own page.

Ours is black with a cream cabin, and it is the Bentley we hand over in Los Angeles at $999 a day. From twenty feet it reads as an expensive SUV rather than as an event; inside it is hushed at freeway speed and settled over the broken tarmac that covers half this city. For a private dinner, a client, or a week of driving yourself up the coast, that is the whole specification, and it is the most W.O. thing about it: you drive a Bentley yourself. Drive a Bentley in Los Angeles: the live calendar and the rest of the details are on the Bentley page.

What it costs, and how it reaches you

The Bentayga is $999/day with a $2,000 refundable security deposit. The Protection plan is priced per day off that deposit band, and your own full policy works instead. The deposit itself comes back 5–7 business days after the car does.

The Bentayga bills day by day for however long you keep it, and a five-day booking is five daily rates.

Collection from our lot on Robertson Boulevard is free, and delivery to the partner hotels in Beverly Hills — the Beverly Wilshire, the Four Seasons at Doheny, L'Ermitage and the Maybourne — is complimentary. Airport delivery is priced in two tiers, and each leg is its own choice.

Tier	What happens at LAX	Both ways
Standard	We leave the car in the airport parking structure and you ride the airport shuttle out to it, about half an hour end to end.	$150
VIP terminal	We bring the car to the terminal. You collect your bags, walk out, and it is standing there.	$300

The shuttle itself costs nothing. Because each leg is its own choice at half the figure, they combine: $150 for standard both directions, $300 for VIP both, $225 for VIP in and standard out, which is the common case. A Bentayga takes the luggage either way, and for an arrival that is part of the day, the terminal tier puts it at the door.

The mileage allowance is written into your rental agreement. Anything beyond it is charged per mile at the rate written into your rental agreement and assessed when the car comes back; the figure for your car is on the agreement before you sign. The rest is in the terms.