When do you know your super-premium cars are becoming perhaps too old or commonplace for their aristocratic target market? When you have to start doing special editions to keep them moving. In Los Angeles, Bentley Continentals seem as common as Chevy Cavaliers on Sunset Boulevard; exclusivity is hard to guarantee even at close to $200,000.

 One, Two, Three Tones a Bentley

Enter the Series 51 Bentley Continental range, named after the year Bentley’s first official styling department was established in Crewe by John Blatchley, who shaped the iconic 1950s Bentley Continentals.

Read more »

The 2009 International Geneva Motor Show in March will see the unveiling of a new supercar from Bentley. The British automaker did not release any details other than that the mystery vehicle will run on bio-fuel and that it will be “its fastest and most powerful production car ever.” For the record, the teaser press shot that accompanied the release seem to point towards a car based on the Continental family – either the coupe or the sedan. Stay tuned on our site as we’ll have more information on Bentley’s supercar as it comes in.

This is Bentley’s facelifted Continental GTC and the mid-life tweakery completes Crewe’s revisions to its Continental range. The changes also usher in the higher-power 600bhp Speed model, which Bentley predicts will account for two-thirds of GTC sales. It’s also the car Bentley denied they’d build when we scooped the GTC Speed last year!

The new Continental GTC range will be on display at next week’s Detroit 2009 motor show.
Is it a full-on facelift for the Bentley Continental GTC, or a mild botox injection?

The latter. Examine the new GTC Speed with a spirit level and you might just spot the more upright front grille with a prouder edge. Chrome bezels now surround the headlamps and there’s a bigger lower air intake to help feed the more powerful engine.
And the extra power that comes from these larger air intakes?

Read more »

With 738 lb-ft of torque, Bentley bestows an extra helping of excess upon its top-down testament to wretched excess.

Really? Of all the cars on the market today that need to muscle up, Bentley’s $342,000 land yacht, the palatial Azure convertible, definitely isn’t one of them. With some 450 horsepower and a prodigious 645 lb-ft of torque available from its twin-turbocharged 6.8-liter V-8, the base Azure can hit 60 mph in 5.6 seconds, a figure that is in no need of improvement, frankly. More to the point—who the hell wants to go hyperspeed in a 6000-pound ragtop, anyway?

Read more »

Antique Road Show: What would Andy Warhol drive? This.

This road test may be irrelevant. Which wouldn’t necessarily make it unique to the pages of C/D. This time, however, it isn’t our fault. See, Bentley is going to create only 550 Brooklands—delivering the final one toward the end of 2009—and 549 of them are already spoken for. The grand-touring coupe you see on these pages, in a color Bentley calls “Porcelain,” is the last copy for sale. Or was at the time this was written.

But don’t sweat it. You probably couldn’t afford one anyway. The base Brooklands, including its $4500 guzzler tax, will set you back $348,085, “but practically no one is going out the door spending less than 400 grand,” notes Bentley’s PR guy. That’s because you’ll want add-ons like a $3190 retractable Flying B hood ornament, and you’d be crazy not to mix and match your Mulliner cockpit veneers—burr oak, burr walnut, bird’s-eye maple, olive ash, vavona, madrona, possibly even plywood—and any 5980-pound flagship wouldn’t be caught dead without the optional carbon-ceramic brake rotors, which will lighten your wallet by $29,270. (Right now, the reader may wish to reflect on vehicular purchases available to him for the cost of this car’s brakes alone.)
Read more »