The Long

Technology has progressed in a manner that makes nearly every vehicle on sale today a luxurious item, to some extent, especially compared to what was considered "entry level" only a couple of decades ago. The world is different now, and people expect to pay good money for nice things. But when every new car has at least some niceties, luxury designers' jobs are more difficult as they now have to surpass everyday luxuries and engineer all-new premium experiences. For Bentley, that meant taking a good, hard look at its seats and making some clever improvements.

Well, it's not just the seats, to be fair. The extended wheelbase Bentayga, with more legroom for rear passengers, is the only model so far that comes with Bentley's new $11,195 Airline rear seats, or what it calls its innovative new live-response seating technology tuned for posture and temperature control of your body, as you're presumably shepherded along by a driver. The SUV is stretched at the rear door by 7 inches, and the large glass roof is pushed back to offer rear passengers more light, but most of the benefit is all in the legroom.

As someone who can't afford business-class travel, my concept of an airline seat is probably a lot different than those riding in the very front of the plane. Bentley isn't interested in my cramped, three-to-a-row, broken-tray-table seat next to the restrooms. No, they're talking about the laid-out, full-recline, bigger-screen, free champagne seating in the premium cabin.

The thinking is that, if you're going to travel, do it as comfortably as possible, which some Bentley customers can clearly afford to do. That's the ethos Bentley wants to carry over from the concept of a relaxed first class flight and into the backseat of the extended wheelbase Bentley Bentayga. We spoke to Steve James, the boss of Bentley interiors, to learn more about the Airline seat technology and application.

What do Airline seats offer that most don't? "A lot more adjustment ways in the seat," James answers. "You can contour adjust the profiles in the second row of the backrest and the cushion, you can change the length of the cushion assembly—the type of features you don't really get in most second-row seats. There's as much adjustment as you get in the front seat of a car,"—and more.

"Through this development, we've learned quite a lot about people's ideal state. There's a theoretical state, maybe, of optimum comfort levels, particularly for thermal," James tells MotorTrend. "We have the data that shows how different people want different things. How females and males interpret surface temperature in contact areas. There's differences there that we have to take into account."

What sort of testing did James' team get into? "A lot of evaluations and an assessor group of about 50 people to give us enough data confidence. We did a couple of calibration loops. We set an optimum position and got lots of females and males and said 'leave it at the set point but tell us how you feel' and constantly recorded that data. A lot of work, a lot of people, and a lot of assessments. It is tested on humans."

Let's go over the surprising amount of settings that detail the functions of these seats. Bentley reckons up to 80 percent of people will use the seats as they come "out of box," which puts them in automated comfort settings determined by the automaker's research into posture and comfort. There's a setting tick either way for those who want to run warmer or colder. Only a fraction of users will likely discover there are deeper settings for specific treatment, like targeted warming relief for back pain, or fever-tackling cooling. The seat construction consists of six pressure zones offering up to 177 individual adjustments.

How does one determine a baseline of what someone finds comfortable? "We created a base, and then we got into quite an extensive physical testing field. There were two elements to that," James elaborated. "How do we as efficiently as possible get you to that most comfortable state, and maintain it. How do we react, and that's where the sensors really come in. Being able to measure to 0.1 degree Celsius."

According to James, about half a degree is the most a human can notice. "We learned what people can feel and what that means. We also went through a process of how quickly can we regulate? This is where the sensors are quite clever in sampling data in 0.1 of a second. I'm not lying when I say I really know what you're feeling before you do."

James is responsible for the in-house team behind the seats, as well as the group of partners brought in to help innovate on the technology required to automate the comfort experience. "I first met the Comfort Motion Global team around 2015 or 2016," James says. "I'm always looking out for potential collaborations, and one of the things that was nice is that CMG had done a lot of research based on medical trials of the benefits of not being static when seated. I was confident that at some point, we'd look to bring technology like that into our cars, it's a very good fit with this wellbeing message. EWB was our first car to target the launch of that functionality."

"Lou, the owner of CMG, is a big Bentley fan, and there was a nice connection there," James adds. "But the technology was really on point, and it's bringing some of the medical expertise. They've done a lot of data, with trials at universities with people showing the improvements in blood flow. It's got a deep-seated scientific benefit. What we've done is execute that in the car in a way that's never been done before."

Bentley also engineered a new seat cooling fan system that can move 80 percent more air while operating more efficiently than traditional systems. "It's a higher level of intelligence," James says. "The seats have a sensing loop now, so they are live-reading data from your surface contact, and then using that to make decisions of how to regulate the thermal properties of the seat. That's a whole new development. We've had to work with partners to develop the sensor set; that was new, it didn't exist. We've had to work with other partners on the technology of how we move the air with fans."

A real-time feedback loop with your butt's contact patch? Got it. Also, twelve electric motors offer 22 different avenues of adjustment in the seat shape, with three pneumatic valves, all controlled and automated by its own ECU. "Using those pneumatic bladders, being able to twist the occupant in all these micro movements, all designed on maximizing the blood flow and keeping you in the best state of wellbeing we can," James advertises. You climb in behind the soft-close, larger EWB doors and select your setting, and the seat takes over for the journey. A detachable control screen can follow you as you recline and extend your legs and feet on the passenger-side seatback leg rest.

Bentley also spent a lot of attention on the seat's relationship with the body of the car as it's moving down the road. "We did a bit of work pioneering simulation tools to do that. We can basically tune the hardness and the density levels of the foams inside the seat to basically filter out the frequencies that you feel so almost desensitize the sensation. We do that by having a multiple construction layer as well. It isn't just one type of harness and density, we've got three different surface materials inside the seat, and each one plays its part in helping tune the response we want. We use [simulations] to set the target based on occupant sizes and mass, we know the sweet spot."

The Bentayga EWB accounted for approximately 40 percent of orders when it went into production last year, and Bentley says up to 50 percent of those orders include the Airline seating option. Where does it plan to take this technology in the future?

"In the EWB, we measure temperature and humidity. Humidity is interesting because it's a good indicator of health. For example, we can see in the data that we take, we can see the effect of motion sickness. You can read that when people get ill, their humidity levels change rapidly. We did find that by driving down some quite winding roads and someone needed to stop. When we looked at the data, we could see things like that trending in the data. We're already looking to bring more of that health monitoring into the car."

The automated climate features also aren't available for front passengers, even in the Azure line, at least yet. Bentley representatives seemed coy at the prospect of that coming in the near future, as well as potentially an expanded model lineup with Airline seat offerings. For now, with such a successful take rate on orders, it seems like more than marketing nonsense; a lot of research, data, and engineering went into the Airline seat, and I reckon we'll see a lot more "comfort automation" in seats from competitors in the near future.