2010 Bentley Mulsanne review

The big Bentley returns. We journey to Scotland to experience the Mulsanne, the first real Bentley in 80 years 

When VW took charge of the Bentley reins back in the late nineties, it had no intention of replacing the ageing Arnage. Its business plan was centred on the upcoming Continental, which launched in 2004, the product that ultimately saved the company. Fast-forward a bit to 2007, and Bentley had a boomer of a year in which it sold 10,000 cars. It was around this time that the Mulsanne project was mooted. Was it hard to convince Volkswagen to give it a whirl? Well, not really as it turns out – not when the firm is run by the same petrol-heads that signed off the Veyron.

But since those days of record sales, volumes have halved, a consequence of model cycles and the GFC. A bad time to be launching a car like this then? Stuart McCullough, member of the board for sales and marketing, while glad the Mulsanne wasn’t launched this time last year, is confident about its prospects, as the car has effectively been spoken for until the end of 2011. And after journeying to the home of golf – that’s Scotland – we can see why. Och aye, what a bonnie Bentley! 

McCullough describes the Mulsanne project as an expression of the company’s values. It’s what the team at Crewe believe a Bentley should be. It’s been 80 years since it’s had the chance to make one all by itself, and so there was little compromised. Few cars emerge on a unique platform these days, but the Mulsanne has. The usual cost considerations went out the double-glazed window. Take the front wing. As the panel can’t be created by conventional pressing, it’s been superformed (a process named after the company that developed the technique for the aerospace industry) by heating the aluminium sheet to 500C, then forcing it into a mould with compressed air. Any unsightly joins in the bodywork are hand-brazed and smoothed to create the ‘hewn from solid’ look that the company loves. And as the boss doesn’t like unsightly aerials, a composite polymer boot-lid is used for that function. 

Inside, it’s a similar story of opulence. Every surface is covered in wood, leather, metal or carpet. The buttons are made of acrylic 4mm thick and then polished to a glass-like finish. Underneath the leather surfaces is a 4mm layer of foam, giving all a softer look and feel. Robin Page, Head of Interior Design, remarked that this is not a cheap or easy option, but it is how the company wanted it. And all the surfaces feel exquisite; you can’t stop running your fingers over them. Where a Continental has just a thin wood veneer on an alloy backing plate for its dashboard inserts, the Mulsanne has proper wood substrates milled from oak. There’s about 20kg of high grade timber that go into the cabin, and another 20kg of bright work. 

The Mulsanne is longer overall, wider and fractionally taller than the Arnage, and it is longer in the wheelbase. Huge is what it is at over 5.5m. It has also a whale-like weight, of 2600kg. The eventual total clearly wasn’t much of a concern. Bentley has developed a deeper, plusher pile for the carpet, for instance, that makes it seven kilos heavier per set for the Mulsanne than the Arnage. You’ve never felt carpet as lush.

The tanning process for the hand-sorted leather is longer and more traditional, ensuring a richer smell and softer feel. Where a Flying Spur uses between 12 and 15 hides in its build, the Mulsanne needs up to 20. A Conti GT requires about five weeks from the initial customer order to delivery: the Mulsanne takes almost two months before it all comes together. The glove box is hide-lined, and even the indicator click sounds suitably posh.

Old-fashioned excess and build philosophies meet 21st century tech here, like the eight-inch screen that disappears, James Bond-like, behind a hand-crafted wooden panel. There’s 20GB of hard drive space on the media player, two SD card slots, and a drawer below the screen to keep your iPod connected but out of sight. For infotainment control, Bentley uses a version of the MMI system from Audi, but it’s not hard to operate and is much more elegantly integrated into the cabin. Also featured is four-zone air conditioning, eight-way adjustment for the rear seats, keyless entry, soft-close doors, a powered boot, adaptive cruise control and a reversing camera, plus there are 40 or so cost options. 

Most will judge the car by its look, as that will be the one element they will ever get to experience. The design is heavy on Bentley heritage, and it works from most angles, but the big headlamps will get people talking. Placed in context – their inspiration is the 8.0-litre model from the ’30s – the acknowledgement is clear, but for some, it will always look ‘googly-eyed’, as one Brit put it during a stopover point during our wee tour of Edinburgh and the north of England. The Mulsanne was previewed to about 1000 or so of Bentley’s special customers before it was officially revealed, so we know that those that matter approve of its form. 

Power for the Mulsanne had to come from an unstressed engine with torrents of torque, and so the venerable 6.75-litre push-rod V8 went in for major surgery to survive another decade. Though you’d think that the W12 could have sufficed, this thumping V8 produces 1020Nm of pull at just 1750rpm, which is 50 per cent more than the W12 can achieve at the same speeds. Bentley experimented with an overhead cam 5.0-litre V8 in the ’80s, and while it delivered good power, low-end torque was lacking. This, a Bentley should never be without, and so the company has stuck with the low-revving V8, albeit in a new, emissions-compliant guise. It is 22kg lighter, due mainly to the newly designed block and heads, but the pistons, rods and forged crankshaft are also lightweight. There are even a few technical highlights, such as cam phasing (valve timing) and cylinder deactivation. Along with bettering efficiency and the torque delivery, cam phasing takes any lumps out of the V8’s idle, which you can hardly feel as it ticks over at 600rpm. The system can close the valves off completely under light cruising loads, dropping the V8 down to a V4 format. W. O. Bentley, founder of the company, was against the idea of forced induction – it was a customer who introduced the idea in the ’20s – but now every car that wears the nameplate is blown. The Mulsanne uses two turbochargers to extract the torque and to bang out the 377kW of peak power. 

An engine with this much stonk hardly needs eight ratios, but the new ZF ’box (about the only major component not made by Bentley) is lighter, more compact and has a better spread of ratios then the old six-speeder. This helps with performance; 100km/h is said to fly by in 5.2sec. But the thing that cracks the grin across your face is the way this thing goes on just a touch of throttle – Union Pacific would approve of the pull. It rolls on quickly, stealthily slipping from the metric tonne up to the old ton without so much as a bead of perspiration. The older four-speed equipped Arnage had a yawning gap between second and third. Punting it along was a case of ‘come on, old girl’ as it lumbered along in third, to ‘settle down, you mad cow’ as it chopped down into second and seriously challenged the traction control. There’s no such worries here. With the number of ratios on offer and a brainiac ECU to choose amongst them, the appropriate gear is quickly and slickly selected. There are gear-shift paddles, not that you’d ever need them.  

Not much in the way of rumble is evident from the V8 – even at 4500rpm it’s pretty quiet – but as Ashley Wickham, leader of the project, noted, noise can always be engineered back in. As for stop-start technology, he says it’s just not refined enough at present for the Bentley, but then no manufacturer has a torque convertor auto with this function. 

Bentley calls the Mulsanne a grand tourer, and sees its owners likelier to sit in the driver’s seat than in the back, at least in Western markets, and so the underpinnings have the job of providing a plush ride and also reining in the potentially mammoth body movements of this mobile palace. For this it employs double wishbones on the front and a multilink arrangement on the rear. The air springs are electronically controlled and are matched by continuously adjustable dampers, which can be tailored four ways between Comfort and Sport – with a ‘Bentley’ setting, which the engineers believe to be the optimum, in between. Or you can tailor a setup more to your liking via the Custom setting. Predictably, Bentley mode is the best all round, while Comfort offers more waft and roll, and Sport tightens things up. The speed-sensitive power steering works just as it should: it’s light at a crawl, solid at centre on the motorway and gives genuine feel in the curves. In fact, it all comes together marvellously: where you might expect at least a hint of hippo-like wallow, it sticks in the corners on its huge rubber and manages to do so with a rather civilised ride for a car on 21-inch rims. The standard 20s are said to ride better. It’s no sports car, mind you. You’re always aware of its ample substance, but for its sheer bulk, progress can be brisk when you put the throttle closer to that plush carpet. 

The Mulsanne will be a rarer car than its main rival, the RR Ghost. While BMW will try and push 2000 Ghosts through a year, Bentley will make just 800 Mulsannes. This is near the production capacity for Crewe, but, as McCollugh says, it’s best to make one car fewer than the market demands. How much did it all cost? ‘Substantial’ is all Stuart will say, but we know that the company did invest €27.5 million in upgrading the production line at Crewe. 

Niggles? The boot is pretty small for such a large car, the door stays aren’t those trick, stay-open-at-any-angle numbers as used by BMW and Porsche, and the new gear selector makes it easy to hit Park accidentally instead of Reverse. But otherwise, everything else is how you’d expect a top-of-the-line Bentley to be: a palace on wheels. 

So how much? Plenty: $621,000 for a well-specified car, and extra personalised items will add even more. The car arrives here at the end of 2010, and the local Bentley agent says at least six New Zealanders are seriously interested, and that it expects to sell two to four cars here a year. 

This review was originally published in the June 2010 issue of NZ Autocar Magazine and was uploaded by reader request.

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