Yahoo Autos London Crawling: Driving the 20-HP Bentley Blower Junior EV
Nothing could be more English than a Buckingham Palace Garden Party, a grand social event where invited dignitaries get to eat cucumber sandwiches and drink Pimm's alongside King Charles III—but the Bentley Blower Junior runs it close. This is a downsized, electrically powered replica of a 1920s Bentley wearing British racing green paint and Union Jack decals. When a karmic coincidence saw our drive in London passing the line of guests waiting to access the palace party, the sight proved compelling enough to have the queuing attendees filming on their phones and shouting polite questions. Even when a phalanx of motorcycle cops stopped traffic so a Bentley Bentayga chauffeuring Princess Anne could sweep by, most spectators remained more enticed by the retro EV.
The love is on a level that puts the Blower Junior's approximately $114,000 launch price into perspective. Yes, that is a serious ask for a vehicle that can muster only 20 horsepower (and which is set to be limited to 25 mph in the U.S.), but you could spend several multiples of that figure on the most exotic hypercar and not win more attention. Even London's notoriously grumpy black-cab drivers smiled, asked questions, and—most unusually of all—were willing to yield gaps.
Although it is an officially sanctioned Bentley product, the Blower Junior is produced by the Little Car Company in Bicester, England. The LCC previously made downsized EV replicas of other classics, including the Aston Martin DB5, the Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa, and the Bugatti Baby—a re-creation of a replica Type 35 that Car and Driver drove in 2020. But unlike LCC's earlier offerings, the Blower Junior is going to be street legal on both sides of the Atlantic, albeit only under restrictive Neighborhood Electric Vehicle restrictions in the U.S., hence the limited top speed.
In the U.K., the Blower Junior is considered a quadricycle, a European vehicle category straddling the definitions of motorcycle and car. The regulations limit overall size—the Junior is an 85 percent replica of the original Blower—and power output, which caps out at 20 horsepower. Electricity resides in a 10.8-kWh 48-volt battery pack, which is recharged through a port mounted in the cast-metal faux supercharger.
Viewed up close, the Blower Junior has a presence that defies even high-level professional cynicism. It is definitely a slightly undersized car rather than an oversized toy. While dimensions have shrunk compared to the original Bentley Blower, proportions have survived, as have almost all the details. The hood's hand-formed metalwork incorporates both cooling louvres for the nonexistent four-cylinder engine and is held in place with leather straps. The rear bodywork is correctly covered in impregnated fabric and it features both wire-spoke wheels and the original car's positive front camber. Suspension uses semi-elliptical springs to locate solid axles at each end, plus Edwardian-spec lever-arm friction dampers.
Anachronistic changes have been made for reasons of safety, the most significant being fitment of well-disguised brake discs gripped by hydraulic motorcycle calipers—the original Blower uses alarmingly feeble cable-operated drums. It also gets the ungainly addition of raised posts to carry mandatory three-point seatbelts for the two fore-and-aft seat positions. The Blower Junior also has three different power levels selected by a Bakelite switch mounted to the polished metal dashboard. This is intended to restrict performance for younger drivers away from the public highway: Comfort limits output to 3 horsepower and a top speed of less than 20 mph, Bentley mode raises it to 11 horses, and Sport brings the full 20-hp fury.
Even in Sport mode, the Junior is not quick. Most of London is governed by 20- or 30-mph speed limits, which weren't a challenge to reach. But a brief excursion onto a faster stretch of highway confirmed that, flat-out, the unlimited Junior's speedometer needle stopped climbing as it reached an indicated 42 mph. Even at that speed, we were wishing for a larger aero screen, the factory demonstrator's minimal one doing little to reduce the slipstream. Little Car Company CEO Ben Hedley says that both a bigger deflector and a slightly higher top speed (in Europe)—a dizzying 50 mph is the target—are being planned for production.
Despite its modest performance, the Junior is a blast to drive. The Bentley gets off the line keenly, the motor producing its peak 98 pound-feet of torque from rest, but acceleration soon fades as the Blower's claimed 1213-pound mass (sans driver) starts to drag.
The unassisted steering starts heavy but lightens as soon as the car starts to move. There is a slight area of slop around the straight-ahead—thanks to the entirely prototypical worm-and-segment mechanism—but it is easy to keep on course without big inputs on the four-spoke string-wrapped steering wheel.
Ride is firm and the Junior's solid axles transmit road imperfections into the car's structure basically unfiltered, but the Junior turns keenly. The combination of the baby EV's narrowness and uninterrupted frontal visibility made it supremely easy to find and exploit gaps. Nor did London's notorious wheel-crunching "width restrictor" curbs, set six feet apart to regulate bigger vehicles, hold any fear.
One surprise was the Junior's lack of regenerative braking, unusual in any electric vehicle. There is a very small amount according to LCC's engineering team, although not enough to ever show on the demonstrator's beautiful analog power-flow meter during the drive. Fortunately, the friction brakes worked flawlessly—although Junior drivers need to remember, when stopping, that a fair amount of the car's structure sits ahead of the front of the bonnet. The 48-volt architecture also limits charging speed, with LCC reckoning a minimum of three hours to replenish the tack fully. The targeted 65-mile maximum range (under Europe's optimistic WLTP protocol) would be purely nominal. Our two-hour drive in London used a third of the battery's charge but only covered about 15 miles.
The only complaint of note was with the monotonous compliance noise the Junior plays to warn pedestrians of its approach, which stayed on even when the car was stationary. This got dull quickly in London's more-stop-than-start traffic. Yet despite this—and the demonstrator's green-tagged EV license plates—very few curious onlookers realized they were looking at a modern car or one that didn't run on gasoline.
The Bentley Blower Junior is an event as much as a vehicle, one that spectators seem to enjoy as much as its driver. Yes, people will point and laugh but in a good way. This is the sort of fame that money can indeed buy.
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