Have Chinese cars made luxury less luxurious?

I think we all have a pretty good idea of what luxury is supposed to feel like. You get into something expensive, everything feels a little nicer than you're used to, there is some fancy feature you've never experienced before, and you have an urge to show everyone you know. I remember getting my first car with a panoramic sunroof and driving around showing friends and family just how much sky I could see from inside the car.

And that used to be the identity of luxury cars. You paid more money and, in return, you got an experience that felt special: expensive leather, better materials, nicer finishes, more technology and often more performance. For a long time, part of the appeal of buying a luxury car was that it was simply faster and more fun to drive.

But even that has started to change. The rise of EVs has made performance much easier to access because instant torque means even relatively affordable electric cars can be super quick. You don't need to spend six figures to get the kind of acceleration that used to be one of the reasons you'd buy an expensive car.

And then there is all the cool technology.

I've spent the past few years getting into Chinese cars and having increasingly ridiculous experiences for increasingly reasonable amounts of money. Massage seats, panoramic roofs, enormous screens, 360-degree cameras, ambient lighting, fridges, rotating screens and all manner of clever little things that would have felt uniquely special not that long ago. You can jump into some of these cars and, on paper at least, they have more luxury features than cars costing several times as much.

And that's where the definition of luxury has started to get a bit complicated. If a $40,000 Chinese EV has a massage seat, what exactly makes the massage seat in a $150,000 car luxurious? If the screen is bigger, the cameras are better, the list of features is longer and you can get ridiculous performance without spending a fortune, what are you actually paying all that extra money for?

I hadn't really thought about it in those terms until I was offered the chance to head to Crewe for the global reveal of the Bentley Torcal, Bentley's first electric car. Obviously, I said yes (thanks carsales, still super grateful). I'd never really experienced a Bentley before, and the idea of flying to England to see a car that hadn't yet been revealed to the rest of the world was a wild prospect.

After about 24 hours of travelling, I was collected from the airport in a Bentley Bentayga and taken to our hotel. I was exhausted, but I remember getting into the back seat and thinking, OK, this is it. This is finally my chance to experience what hundreds of thousands of dollars gets you in a car.

And the slightly awkward thing was that, sitting there, I couldn't really see anything that I hadn't already experienced in much, much cheaper cars.

The Bentayga was obviously beautiful. The materials were lovely, everything felt incredibly well made, and there was a quality to the way it was put together that you could feel. But when it came to the technology, features and even the overall aesthetic, I wasn't having that same little wow moment I'd had the first time I discovered a panoramic roof. I'd seen all of this before, and I'd seen it in cars that cost a fraction of what this one did.

I should probably point out that I hadn't driven the Bentayga, and I hadn't spent enough time with it to make any sort of judgement about what it's actually like to own one. I was just being driven from the airport on very few hours of sleep. But it did make me think: if I'm sitting in a car that costs closer to half a million dollars and my immediate reaction is that I've seen most of this before, where is the luxury actually coming from?

Then I had a nap, we went to the Bentley factory, and I started to understand it.

What struck me wasn't some enormous technological breakthrough or a feature I'd never seen before. It was just how much time, skill and attention were being poured into things that most people would probably never notice. There are people whose entire job is to make sure the stitching across your seat is exactly right, to work with materials in ways that take an almost absurd amount of time, and to obsess over details that don't make the car any faster, safer or more practical.

I was told one particular cross-stitching process takes around 38 hours on a single vehicle, which is frankly an absurd amount of time to spend sewing something into a car when you could probably achieve the same basic outcome considerably faster with a machine.

But that's the whole point.

If you look at something like a luxury handbag, nobody really expects it to have 14 more pockets than a $50 handbag or a touchscreen sewn into the side of it. What you're paying for is the leather, the craftsmanship, the quality and the amount of time somebody has spent making it. The value isn't necessarily in giving you more stuff; it's in the fact that somebody has gone to completely unnecessary lengths to make something beautiful.

And suddenly, the Bentayga made a bit more sense to me.

The Torcal is actually a really good example of this because Bentley could have taken the modern luxury EV playbook and simply thrown every conceivable feature at it. Instead, there are details throughout the car that feel almost deliberately excessive in a completely different way.

The digital light patterns inside the car are based on real hand-cut crystal, with Bentley filming light passing through the crystal so the digital version retains the imperfections of the real thing. Even the sound the car makes has been created by musicians recreating the drumbeat rhythm of Bentley's V8 rather than simply recording the engine and playing it through a speaker.

None of this is necessary; it's a pursuit of artistry.

We've spent years making luxury about what you get, and the Chinese car industry has become very good at taking those things and putting them into cars that far more people can afford. The technology has escaped. The performance has escaped. Even some of the fancy materials and design tricks have made their way down into much cheaper cars.

So traditional luxury brands have to find other ways of making people feel like they're getting something genuinely different.

That doesn't necessarily mean craftsmanship is the only answer. There are still obvious reasons people buy luxury cars that have nothing to do with a massage seat or the size of the screen. Brand matters. Status matters. Quality matters. So does the way you're treated after you've handed over your money, and the overall ownership experience that comes with being part of a particular brand.

Lexus, for example, has been experimenting with its Encore experiences, where the relationship with the customer extends beyond simply handing over the keys to a new car.

And I think that's an interesting shift because, once the tangible stuff becomes harder to differentiate, the things that can't be easily replicated become much more important. The materials, the craftsmanship, the service, the experience and, ultimately, the amount of care that has gone into making the thing.

I think that's why the Bentley factory stuck with me more than the car itself.

I'd gone there expecting to be blown away by some piece of technology I'd never seen before because that's how I've been conditioned to think about luxury cars. More features, more technology, more stuff. Instead, what impressed me was watching someone spend hours doing something that most people would never even notice.

So perhaps the next chapter of luxury is less about having more and more about how much went into making what you have.

Because if you can sit in a $40,000 Chinese car and struggle to understand why the car across the road costs $200,000 more, the luxury car industry has a pretty interesting problem on its hands.

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