April 24, 2009Status Incarnate Has Terrible Gas Mileage and An Absurd Price Tag…Bummer (Though No Big Surprise)

photo via: Los Angeles Times

Dan Neil’s piece on the new Bentley Continental GTC is highly amusing…check out the full length piece by hitting the link below, or read the excerpts I’ve posted.

Text via: Los Angeles Times

As day follows dawn, I’ll get e-mails this morning to this effect: 

“Dear worthless shill, how can you justify writing about a quarter-million-dollar convertible that gets single-digit gas mileage when the economy is in ruins, the poles are melting and both are worsened by this nation’s obsession with oil? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? You should be selling pencils, not pushing them. Love, Mom.”

First, a bit of insight into the process: Typically, I write about cars that are new to the market, given that they are, well, news. The Bentley Continental GTC Speed is fresh off the diamond cutter’s bench and so it qualifies.

I also try to write about cars that are significant, and the GTC Speed is remarkable in that it returns positively the worst gas mileage I have ever observed in any car that didn’t have a roll cage and parachute on the back. This, the high-performance version of the Continental GTC — powered by a 6.0-liter, 12-cylinder engine producing 600 horsepower and 553 pound-feet of torque — is a woeful and desolate killing field of hydrocarbons, the wailing wall of dead dinosaurs. In typical, around-town, stop-and-go driving, this exquisite British convertible gets about 5 to 7 miles per gallon, and during hard acceleration 3 mpg. 

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That said, this is an astonishing automobile for an astonishing price. Bentley’s command of sensory gratification is nearly erotic. For example, when you downshift the big car using the manual paddle shifters on the steering wheel and you roll out of the throttle as you set up for a corner, the sound of the decelerating engine, what car guys call overrun, is stunning — a warm, breathy thunder, full of impending threat, like you’re being passed on the right by a Kansas rainstorm. 

Every tactile detail — the knurl on the alloy gearshift, the diamond-quilt leather upholstery, the dazzling “engine-turned” aluminum fascia on the dash and door — provokes a heady rush of spiraling appetite and heart-pounding materialism. To the Bentley driver, Gandhi is just some old guy in a diaper.

There is one more sensation worth noting: exquisite silence. The Bentley has got to be the quietest ragtop ever built.

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