Bentley Motors pulled the wraps off the all-new Bentley Mulsanne flagship sedan at this year’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Designed and engineered at Crewe from the ground-up, the new Mulsanne “reaffirms the marque’s intent to create a new flagship Bentley with refined performance and unparalleled levels of luxury with the coach building elegance for which the marque has long been renowned.”
OK Bentley Boys, let’s see what you got.
$285,000.
That’s what it will cost you to buy a Bentley Mulsanne in the United States when it goes on sale in the fall of this year. And for that kind of scratch, you can seemingly get the Big Bentley in any flavor you want. The luxoboat Bentley flagship offers a palette of 114 paint colors, 21 carpet colors, nine wood veneers and 24 interior leather hides ” … all of which will be tanned using a decades-old process to ensure this future classic retains its distinctive scent.” But of course, only a person of Lesser Quality would settle for less.
If that’s not enough for you, and you consider $285,000 to be chump change and a car like the Bentley Mulsanne to be a bauble you pick up for the hell of it for a couple of years, then you can go with something even more special.
Bentley, naturally, offers a bespoke service where you can get unique colors that will exactly match your vision and taste. They also offer more standard leather and wood veneer than any other Bentley in the modern era, but if you decide to go the bespoke route, you’ll have to wait, each Mulsanne will take nine weeks to build.
What’s under the hood? Naturally, it’s Bentley’s hand-assembled V8 engine. For the new Mulsanne it has been re-engineered to employ advanced technologies to deliver “unstressed, refined performance”. (Don’t you just love the way these Brits talk?) The new Bentley V8 plant is lighter and now features cylinder de-activation and variable cam phasing, to appreciably reduce both fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.
And on the inside, the guys from Crewe have on offer heritage-inspired dials and new glass-effect switches and leading edge features such as iPod and mp3 connectivity, Bluetooth and a SIM card reader, as well as a third generation MMI system. And if you want to you can opt for NAIM’s premium audio system and be treated to “the world’s most powerful system fitted to a production vehicle”: a 20-channel 2,200-watt experience.
Photo: Bentley
