The Grand Tourer is a fairly crowded segment within the car industry, where the lines between the vehicle classes are becoming increasingly blurred. Traditional Grand Tourers such as the Mercedes-Benz S class and the likes of Ferrari GTC4Lusso face stiff competition from the likes of Aston Martin DB11, Rolls-Royce Wraith, Mercedes-Benz AMG GT and even, albeit slightly debatable, the McLaren GT.
Bentley, however, has been a brand that has traditionally aimed at being the benchmark of the GT segment with its Continental series. The new Bentley Continental GT wants to push the class even further and rise above the competition.
Yes the Bentley (The GT starts in Europe from €200.000) along with Rolls-Royce (Wraith starts from €286.000) are known for their opulence and immense price tags as well as clunky driving capabilities, but those days are in the past. Well, the price tag still remains high and the opulence still remains, but the driving capabilities have improved immensely.
I wanted to see if there still is a place for a car like the Bentley Continental GT in today’s society and does attention to detail as well as beauty mean anything to today’s buyers.
The Interior of the Bentley Continental GT
When we are children, we are encouraged to strive for excellence, to shoot for the stars and to push the boundaries of our talents and try to create something. However, as we get older we tend to want to fit in rather than to stand out, we copy and paste, we tone down our excitement and we follow the rules. This is of course fine, but rarely does normal create the extraordinary.
Most car companies are victims of this mentality, as the majority of the car brands aim to sell as many cars as possible with maximum profit, which is why design and creativity usually take a backseat (pun intended) to limited budgets, practicality and performance. Some call this the Copy-and-paste method.
The Continental V8 Hardtop
However, Bentley is slightly different. A legendary centenarian British company, owned by the Volkswagen Group, tends to make luxury vehicles with outstanding performance, admired for its attention to detail and the obsession with ride comfort.
I had the privilege of testing the Continental GT Convertible and taking it to the German highway (autobahn) in order to test its power, and easily reached the top speed of 310 kmph (and did not fear for my life) and into the streets of Amsterdam to test its agility. In top speeds the GT sincerely feels like a super-yacht cruising along the Rhine river. The comfort and the feeling of safety combined with the sheer power is absolutely mesmerising.
While I was driving this road yacht, I was wondering what is the purpose of a luxury item anyway? Perhaps its ability to make the owner feel happy, proud and successful.
You see, the Continental GT appeals to all ages, to all genders and to all races no matter the location, and I am not talking in form of ownership, but as a viewer, just like an art gallery. When people see it, they start dreaming about the possibilities in their lives. It certainly had that kind of an impact on me.
Head designer, Stefan Sielaff, and his team have left nothing to chance. The exterior of the GT looks as if the car gods themselves moulded it from one single piece of car-stuff with its imposing grill, whiskey tumbler inspired headlights - which remind me of very expensive jewellery - and the smooth lines with occasional sharp cuts, communicate eternity and elegance.
The V8 looks sleek everywhere
Potential buyers in this segment truly care about the attention to detail, aesthetics, power and above all the feel the car gives the owner. The interior plays a crucial role in this aspect as it communicates constantly to the driver where they are and if they have been provided an exceptional environment to be in. Aston Martin, Ferrari and McLaren all have good interiors, and Rolls-Royce is known for its lush interior, Bentley, in this writers humble opinion, has taken the game up a notch when it comes to the interior.
It is in fact the interior is where the GT tries to outshine its competitors, which I view as an ode to craftsmanship and creativity, and a result of relentless attention to detail. Starting from the seats, which feel like luxurious armchair, are just sublime, and they deserve an entire article on their own, but I’ll try to do them justice in just couple of paragraphs: There are over 320.000 handwoven stitches on the 4 seats on a stunning “Diamond on Diamond” pattern which oozes class, comfort, sophistication and timelessness. The seats are not only capable of cooling you down or warming you up, or able to give fabulous massages, but they keep you safe too. When the car accelerates abruptly or takes hard corners, the seats “hug” the passengers and tighten up the seat belts, embracing the passenger into something that resembles an embrace from a mother who tries to protect you, and it feels really good.
The lead designer of the seats, the 32-year-old Louise McCallum, put the seats through rigorous testing which included road trips, with people of different shapes, from Crewe in England all the way up to Scotland, in order to understand the needs of potential passengers, and therefore design seats that could cater to all types of humans rather than for the average type.
As a design-centric company, Bentley takes details extremely seriously. From the immaculate positioning of the quilting, to the origins of the leather - which is a by-product from the meat industry - and to the fabulous wood used in the interior which comes from a sustainable source in Hawaii, all the way to the innovative patterns on the levers to the fabulous clock made by Breitling. Everything is thought through with utmost attention and as soon as you sit in the Continental the details and the quality sing to you in unison like a gospel choir.
The GT shows its colours
Bentley’s head interior designer Darren Day, invented something unique in the automotive industry called the rotating display. This remarkable engineering and design masterpiece, has three sides. The first side displays the infotainment console, the second displays three analogue dials (temperature, compass and stopwatch) and finally the third side side reveals a beautiful seamless panel without anything to display, in order to bring alive the ethos of digital detox and allow the driver and the passengers to concentrate on the beauty of the interior and on the driving. Seeing the rotating display for the first time made my jaws drop. It is a spectacular car magic to behold. The rotating display has 153 individual components and took 3 years to develop. The innovation, precision and sheer courage to create and implement something like the rotating display demonstrates where Bentley is going as a company. This is how you push the industry forward.
The harmonious symphony between the stunning exterior design and the luxurious interior can be emotional to witness. Car lover or not, one falls in love with this machine.
The model I tried had the 4-litre V8 engine which can produce 542 BHP getting from 0 to 100 kmph in just 4 seconds. With a base price of €165.000 (excluding the VAT) it had €60.000 worth of options plus taxes making it a total of (without the VAT) €223.000 (convertible is around €12.000 more). The V8 GT boasts 770 Newton Meters and can reach a maximum speed of 318 kmph (198 miles per hour). A car weighing 2.2 tons has no business moving this fast, these are Porsche 911 figures. It is more than just impressive to experience the GT defying the laws of physics. However, unlike the 911, inside the GT, the ride even at 280kmph feels quiet and sophisticated thanks to double-layered glass and sound-deadening.
The perfect interior
For a heavy and fairly a large car, the GT handles itself amazingly well, taking the corners like a wild horse thanks to the sublime power steering which is fast enough that you rarely need to reposition your hands for tight turns, and doing a fantastic job of communicating what the 20-inch front wheels are up to.
There is not an area where the team has compromised on an acceptable solution, everything is done to the highest quality with the highest possible attention to detail. However, driving the Continental GT can be an even more emotional experience than just looking at it. With its massive 420 mm front brake discs, biggest in any production car out there (at the time of writing), are designed to cope stopping this 2.2-ton vehicle at the speeds of 300 km/h without slinging the driver to the windshield (tested and certified). This is an astonishing experience and I can not begin to explain how it feels. The feeling of not being strangled by the seatbelts and punished by physics while braking hard, is a bizarre and liberating experience.
The four-wheel-drive Continental GT has something called a dynamic ride system which ensures a responsive ride and an exceptional handling in all road conditions and especially in the corners, which means that with some Bentley witchcraft, the GT doesn’t experience almost any lateral roll! Its mind blowing and can only be understood by experiencing it. Seriously, I cannot stress enough how phenomenal this feature alone is.
The V8 gliding through the highway
There is so much going on in this car, for instance the fabulous and almost black magic coasting technology which glides the car along the road so effortlessly, effectively decreasing the fuel consumption (full tank has a 800km range!) and gliding the car along is wonderful and quite bizarre. You feel as if you left your foot on the accelerator, as the car keeps on going. Then there is the night vision camera (comes very handy in case of a zombie apocalypse) which is handy for anyone living in the countryside or outside of urban areas.
The Continental GT is the most comfortable car I’ve ever driven and that is due to the suspension system which left me and anyone joining the ride, quite literally speechless. It uses a special air suspension which uses three-chamber air springs that offer the scope to vary from sporting spring stiffness to luxury limousine refinement. It is a glorious experience!
Bentley has not only set the new standard for the premium car segment but they have set a new benchmark in car design as a whole, and I look forward to seeing how they can outperform themselves.
