We’ve got one last new Ducati for 2024 – and it happens to be one of the most expensive bikes the Bologna firm has ever made. The new Bentley edition Ducati Diavel Mulliner edition will set you back a stunning £71,000 – and you’ll need to already be a Bentley owner to be able to buy one. Just 50 will be made, and they’ll be painted in genuine Bentley paint to match your car… There are also 500 ‘standard’ Bentley edition Diavel V4s being built, and ‘anyone’ can buy one of these – if they have £58,000.
But why Bentley? Well, both Ducati and the classic luxury car brand are owned by the Volkswagen Audi Group, and come under the same ‘super-premium’ arm of the business. Lamborghini is also part of that division, so in 2021 we saw a special ‘Lamborghini’ edition of the Diavel 1260 V-twin, with a trick paint job inspired by the 819bhp Lamborghini Sian FKP37 Countach supercar.
The limited edition run of 630 bikes sold out, even priced at £28k. Ducati followed up with an even pricier Lamborghini Streetfighter V4S last year, which cost nearly £56k – and also sold out.
So for 2024 there’s a new car tie-in, this time the traditional English Bentley brand, long since removed from British ownership but still based in Crewe. Ducati’s gone back to the Diavel, this time the V4 version, with its 168bhp Granturismo engine. There’s no S variant as yet, so no electronic Öhlins suspension or the like, but even the base bike is a pretty stunning piece of kit.
The Bentley edition features unique forged aluminium wheels, carbon bodywork all round (fenders, headlamp cover, engine, exhaust and radiator covers, radiator shrouds, side panels and tail piece), and adds a special Scarab Green paint job taken from the £2million 740PS twin-turbo W12 Bentley Batur supercar. The side air intakes match the two-tone front grille of the Batur, and the triangular rear extractors echo the back end of the car.
The front mudguard, the fairing and the upper view of the tank apparently ‘recall the ribs on the front bonnet’, while the single-seater tail, which can be replaced with a pillion seat, ‘takes many styling cues from the double-layer extractor on the back of the Batur’, according to the press release. The seat itself is made from special embroidered Alcantara, and the TFT digital dash has a one-off startup animation. Each bike also has a numbered plaque on the right hand side of the rear cylinder head.
There will be 500 of these basic Scarab Green Bentley Diavels, for that steep £58k price tag. But there are also another 50 even more unique Mulliner edition bikes. Mulliner was a coachwork firm in Chiswick at the turn of the century, which worked on early Rolls-Royce car production, and was later absorbed into the Rolls-Royce company itself, before ending up as a styling sub-brand of Bentley. The Mulliner editions of Bentley super-luxury machines like the Turbo R and Turbo RT had even more performance and luxurious interiors, famously adding things like a rear mounted speedometer for the well-heeled passengers to keep an eye on what the driver is up to…
When it comes to the Mulliner Diavel, the catch is that the bikes are only available to existing Bentley car owners, but Ducati will paint the bike to match your car, and you can also customise the colours for the seat, brake calipers, wheels and bodywork. There’s even a capsule collection of helmet and jacket produced between the two firms, to match the bikes. The price of the Mulliner edition is a frankly outlandish £71k – almost three times the price of a standard Diavel V4 (£23,595).
That would be steep if you were getting a race-tuned engine and MotoGP-spec suspension and brake components. But for essentially a cosmetic custom with some fancy paint, a numbered plaque and a posh wooden crate, it seems way off the mark. Having said that, we’re sure Ducati and Bentley have done their research, and they’ll sell the entire production to the usual committed (and super rich) Ducati/Bentley collectors…