Bentley’s Electric Blower Jnr Finally Reaches Owners — With More Power Than Promised
The first 25 road-legal, 85-percent-scale electric Blowers are done, with more power and range than quoted in 2023 — and a new 1:18 model joins them.
Three years after it was first shown, Bentley's electric Blower Jnr is finally ready for its owners. The first 25 cars have been completed at Hedley Studios' workshop in Bicester, England, and Bentley has taken the very first one for itself, delivered to its Crewe campus — the same site where the company is preparing to hand-build its first EV.
The 85-percent-scale recreation of the 1929 4½ Litre Supercharged Team Car No. 2 also arrives with more performance than was promised at launch. Bentley now quotes 31 hp (23 kW), a top speed of more than 50 mph (80 km/h), and a certified range of up to 75 miles (120 km).
Late to arrive, quicker on the road
When Bentley and The Little Car Company, as Hedley Studios was then called, announced the car in August 2023, it had a 20-hp (15 kW) motor, a 45-mph (72 km/h) top speed in the UK and Europe, and an expected range of about 65 miles. US cars were to be limited to 25 mph. Production of the first 99 First Edition cars was scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2024, so the first customer batch is landing more than two years behind that plan.
Neither company has explained the delay, but founder Ben Hedley points to the size of the job. Headlights, turn signals, brakes, the electrical system, and even a backup camera all had to be engineered to disappear into a 1920s silhouette, and the car is homologated as a newly manufactured production vehicle. Hedley says it may be the first recreation of a pre-war design to clear that bar.
Production is capped at 349 cars. Motoring Research reported First Edition pricing of £108,000 in the UK at the 2023 reveal. Bentley hasn't confirmed current pricing, or whether US-market cars keep the 25-mph limit.
Two more Blowers, built for the shelf
The rest of the news is far smaller. Amalgam Collection, the British maker of hand-built large-scale models, has added a 1:18 Blower developed with Bentley, and calls it the most complex model it has made at that scale. Pricing is on application.
It joins Amalgam's 1:8 Blower, first shown in February 2020, which lists at £16,955 in an edition of 199. A new race-weathered 1:8 version, limited to 30 pieces, is hand-finished to show Team Car No. 2 as it looked after the 1930 24 Hours of Le Mans — down to rear fenders bent by tire failures. Owners of Bentley's Blower Continuation Series can also order either scale built to match the specification of their own car.
One car behind all of them
Every version traces back to Team Car No. 2, registered UU 5872, one of four supercharged team cars Bentley ran at Le Mans in 1930. It remains part of the Bentley Heritage Collection and still appears at events and driving experiences. It was also the master for the 12-car Continuation Series: Bentley laser-scanned every component during a restoration and built a dozen new, pre-sold cars from that data.
That makes one 1929 race car the source for a continuation run, a 349-unit road-legal EV, and two lines of collector models. For a company that has just revealed its first electric SUV, the past remains a busy business — much as it is for Porsche, whose Classic division just named its 2026 Classic Restoration Challenge finalists.
