Advertisement

Bentley Continental GT geared toward wide-open spaces, including parking spots

Share

Saying it became a chore to drive a particular car probably wouldn’t catch your attention. Telling you that car was the 2011 Bentley Continental GT with a $215,675 price tag might.

For four days and just over 200 miles, I was witness to a car with face-stretching acceleration, the road presence of a gilded tank and the social panache of a silver screen starlet. And I found nearly the whole experience tedious.

Yes, you’re reading this right. It’s possible to get tired of driving a 12-cylinder leviathan that has enough power to send the space shuttle Endeavor into orbit.

Advertisement

And one with esteemed provenance, no less. Owned for decades by Rolls Royce and bought by Volkswagen in 1998, Bentley has been building heavy, fast cars since before the Depression.

The Continental GT has been the company’s bestselling model since it introduced the two-door, four-seat coupe in 2003. This 2011 version isn’t actually all-new; the powertrain, suspension and body are just thoroughly updated for the first time since Bentley started making the car.

To be clear, I was not driving it from the casinos of Monaco to the shores of Switzerland’s Lac Leman. I was not using its all-wheel-drive system on the mountain passes that are chiseled out of the Pyrenees or opening up the Bentley’s 567 horsepower and 516 pound-feet of torque on the straights of Britain’s A70 highway.

You see, the “GT” on this Bentley’s birth certificate stands for Grand Tourer. Its modus operandi is long trips on undulating, open roads at eye-watering speed with all the comfort and serenity of a cigar bar. Deviation from this directed use results in unpleasant side effects like any other prescription.

The best performance-oriented driving I could do was through the hills and canyons of Malibu. Hustling the Continental GT though the blind, hairpin turns and around precipitous cliffs does not make this car comfortable, though it allows one to explore the limitations of the 5,100-pound coupe.

Some large cars, namely the Porsche Panamera and Aston Martin Rapide, seem to shrink around you and belie their mass when pushing through tight turns. Not this Bentley. With a nose-heavy setup and 21/2 tons of curb weight, it never feels smaller than it is.

Advertisement

But it eats up corners with heaps of traction, aided by the all-wheel-drive system that sends 40% of the torque to the front wheels and 60% to the rear.

I was blessed with some pity from the transportation gods and had several long moments on the freeway so that I could stretch out the Continental GT’s legs. And how. This car is like Julie Newmar; it has legs for days. At high speed, the cabin is library-quiet, despite the air rushing around the car and the twin-turbocharged W-12 engine (that’s two V-6’s paired together) humming along directly in front of you.

In fact, the engine is so quiet that if you didn’t know better, you would think there’s a demure V-8 under the hood. You would think.

The twin-turbochargers give the Continental GT a wide torque band, so acceleration exercises are possible at almost any speed. Simply put the six-speed automatic transmission into Sport mode, rip off a couple of downshifts on the steering-column-mounted paddle shifters, and lean on the gas pedal. Objects in your mirror are shrinking faster than they would in any V-8.

Unfortunately, so is your fuel. Caring about the gas mileage of this car is like inviting Ted Nugent to a PETA fund-raiser. Pointless. But if you have to know, I got 11.1 miles per gallon during 200 miles of driving. The EPA rates the car at 12 mpg in the city and 19 mpg on the highway.

If the W-12 setup is too rich or too thirsty for your blood, stay tuned later this year when Bentley will make available a V-8 engine in the Continental GT.

Advertisement

Sadly, expanses of open freeways are rare. The rest of my time with this Bentley I used it as a daily driver, as most of its buyers will.

This is where the tedium set in.

For starters, the bashful nature of the transmission in normal mode is downright annoying when accelerating from a complete stop. You’d expect that a car that can do zero to 60 mph in 4.4 seconds when really pushed wouldn’t be sluggish around town.

You’d also expect the Continental GT’s look to evolve a bit more. This 2011 model wears all-new sheet metal throughout and now carries a headlight arrangement similar to Bentley’s only other nameplate, the Mulsanne sedan.

It still carries itself with the powerful elegance of the previous GT, but if you’ve traded up from the older model, forgive your neighbors if they don’t immediately notice.

Forgive them too if they think you’re terrible at parking. Despite the backup camera and parking sensors, massive blind spots behind the rear occupants and poor visibility all around the cabin make this one to give to the valet.

The touch screen navigation system is borrowed from other Volkswagens, flaws and all. These include a dearth of street names and a slow response time to update your directions.

Advertisement

Also troubling in a car with such an exorbitant asking price was some of the switchgear for the heating and cooling. They’re arrayed nicely, but it was hard to tell whether they were on, and the quality of these buttons left something to be desired.

True Bentley quality is in the rest of the cabin. It’s beautifully wrought with wood veneers, stitched leather and finely detailed knurled metal controls on the steering wheel.

I’d tell you that the power trunk opens comically slow but then it would just sound like I was whining.

While these may seem like insignificant quirks to an otherworldly coupe, when you stir them all together, you get a car that isn’t as attuned to daily use as you’d expect.

None of these eccentricities is enough for me to tell you not to buy the car for my upcoming birthday.

But if it’s my hard-earned (or hard-inherited) coin going to the purchase of a car with a pedigree robust enough to make a Hapsburg jealous, this isn’t it.

There are simply other deliriously powerful options out there that in exchange for similar sacrifices in practicality, deliver more rewards, tangible and otherwise.

Advertisement

david.undercoffler@latimes.com

Advertisement