With torque characteristics and a soundtrack reminiscent of an ocean liner’s steam engine, the Bentley Mulsanne?s venerable 6.8-liter V-8 is a one-of-a-kind powerplant. But the 57-year-old engine, which the company calls a ?6 3/4 Litre,? won’t survive beyond the current Mulsanne, we are told by Bentley CEO Wolfgang Dürheimer, who says that the V-8 has found its “final home” there. He confirmed that the next generation of Bentley?s flagship will be powered by a 12-cylinder engine, but he didn’t pin down a timeline for that car’s introduction.
If Bentley seems to be in no hurry to shed this key attribute of its heritage, it has also been clear for years that one of the industry’s most enduring powerplants couldn’t last much longer; now time seems to be ticking down to the end. Known as the L-series, the V-8 was launched in 1959 and subsequently used by generations of Rolls-Royce and Bentley models. It appeared that BMW had finally killed it off in the late 1990s, when it replaced the engine with a BMW-derived 4.4-liter V-8. At the time, Munich was already asserting that it wasn’t worth updating what was then a 40-year-old design to meet ever-stiffening regulations for emissions and fuel economy. But just a year later, VW took over and humbled BMW by reintroducing the L-series engine under the Red Label moniker. The BMW engine, christened Green Label, sold so poorly that it was discarded shortly thereafter. (It wasn̵...