The first electric Bentley has a Porsche's numbers, and chose to be slower

Bentley showed the Torcal in London this morning: its first electric car, its fourth model line, and a five metre SUV designed, engineered and built in Crewe. It comes in two versions. The Torcal has 821 PS and 1,194 Nm, gets to 60 mph in 3.3 seconds and runs to 155 mph. The Torcal S has 888 PS and 1,350 Nm with Launch Control, gets to 60 in 2.8 seconds and runs to 162 mph. Both have a 113 kWh battery, up to 375 miles of WLTP range and charge at up to 400 kW.

Those last figures will look familiar to anyone who has read the Cayenne Electric page. Porsche's car has a 113 kWh battery and takes 400 kW. The Cayenne Turbo runs to 162 mph, the same as the Torcal S. Porsche and Bentley are both Volkswagen Group, and a new electric SUV from one arriving with the other's battery size and charging speed is not a coincidence anyone should build much on. Bentley's release does not name a platform, so we will not name one for it. But at this price the family resemblance is worth knowing about before anything else.

The resemblance ends at the performance, and Bentley says that is on purpose. The Cayenne Turbo has 857 PS in normal driving and 1,156 PS on Launch Control, 1,500 Nm, and gets to 62 mph in 2.5 seconds. The Torcal S, with the most torque Bentley has ever put in a car, is three tenths slower. The release says the R&D team stopped there deliberately, "with knowledge that most customers find acceleration more extreme than this to be an uncomfortable experience". It is rare for a car company to write that down, and it is probably right. A 2.8 second SUV is already quicker than almost anyone wants to be on a slip road. What Bentley is selling is the ride: fully active suspension, dampers that take the place of anti-roll bars, and rear-wheel steering that brings the turning circle down to 11.1 metres.

The car it will be shopped against is British, big and electric too. The Range Rover Electric First Edition costs £157,610, has 372 miles of WLTP range and charges from 10 to 80% in 22 minutes. The Rolls-Royce Spectre goes further, at 390 miles, but takes 195 kW at most and 28 minutes to do the same. On paper the Torcal charges faster than both.

How much faster depends on which page of the release you read. The headline says 10 to 80% in 16 minutes at 400 kW. Page six says "just under 20 minutes". We have recorded the headline figure, with both in the note, until Bentley says which is right. On the Cayenne, reaching 400 kW needs a charger giving more than 390 kW at over 850 volts, which almost nothing in Britain does yet. Bentley has not said what the Torcal needs, but it would be surprising if the answer were very different.

The Bentley parts are the ones no Porsche has. There is a propulsion sound, the Dynamic Symphony, recorded on drums, viola and bass guitar to the rhythm of a Bentley V8, which can be turned off. The indicators are a recording of a hammer striking leather in the upholstery shop. There is a Merino wool upholstery woven by Fox Brothers in Somerset, a walnut veneer pressed from up to a thousand layers of off-cuts, and a three-seat rear bench that folds itself. It is the shortest four-door Bentley, yet it has a 460 litre boot and another 90 litres under the bonnet.

What is missing is what decides whether any of this matters: a price, an on-sale date, and dimensions beyond "five metres". The EU range and consumption figures are still waiting for type approval. We will put them up when Bentley does.