Is The New Bentley Mulsanne The World’s Most Luxurious Car?
You may never see a 2016 Bentley Mulsanne in real life. Bentley can only build about 1,000 copies of its flagship sedan a year, and at prices starting at $300,000, seeing one on American roads outside of the largest cities would almost count as a UFO sighting. And yet, what Bentley has done to remake the car as the most luxurious ride in the world speaks to some deeper truths about the cars we drive everyday.
Take the door handles. Car door handles today have to be plastic so that the signal from a key fob can penetrate and allow a smooth keyless entry. Bentley doesn’t really do plastic. Every piece that looks like wood and leather and crystal is just that in a Bentley, and so the door handles on the $300,000-plus Mulsanne are smooth ingots of chromed, signal-blocking steel.
But Mulsanne owners should be able to keylessly open their doors just as any Corolla owner can. To solve this, Bentley also put a chrome layer on the door’s scallop, and a knurled plastic window in the back of the pull. That scallop serves as a mirror for the signal from the key fob, bouncing it through the window to unlock the door. No other automaker goes to such trouble to make sure it’s owners never touch something fake.
The Mulsanne’s redesign successfully fixes the old’s model’s big flaw—that odd headlamp placement—while giving the car more of a commanding road presence. At the front, the new grille looks of a piece with the body rather than a Photoshopped addition; out back the new “B” shaped taillights could have been pure Velveeta, but have enough detail to look tasteful. There are now three distinct sub-models; the Signature and Speed editions will differ in some coloring and wheel choices, while the long-wheelbase model gets a more expressive rear door that adds to its luxury. Power as always comes from the 6.75-liter V-12, making 505 horsepower and 752 lb-ft of torque in the regular models and 530 hp/811 lb-ft of torque in the Mulsanne Speed, enough to toss two and a half tons of British land dreadnaught to 60 mph in 4.9 seconds.
(And there’s one more new model: a six-passenger Mulliner edition that’s a full three feet longer than a regular Mulsanne. Clearly aimed to fight for hauling the world’s billionaires and potentates with the Mercedes Pullman, Bentley already has an order for 12 copies of the stretched Mulsanne—from the same buyer.)
The challenge for a car like the Mulsanne comes from trying to maintain its classical pose while remaining modern enough to satisfy a 21st-century lord. The dash now has a touchscreen. Rear passengers get their own detachable 10-inch Android-powered Bentley tablets, which can be rested, sort of, on a chrome-and-wood fold-out table made of some 600 parts. Of course there’s 4G WiFi, and the Naim stereo now has 2,200 watts filling 20 speakers, enough to bleed the tannins from the 17 leather hides used inside the car.
All this said, Bentley still struggles with technology. The new Mulsanne has automatic braking and cruise control, but so does the new Chevy Malibu. Unlike the Mulsanne, the Malibu and other midsize sedans can park themselves both parallel and perpendicularly, a trick not possible with the older electronics in a low-volume Mulsanne. And while the self-driving epoch has begun to seep into mid-tier luxury cars, no such time seems evident for the Mulsanne.
Bentley execs have two responses to this paradox. One is to jest that Bentleys have long been self-driven, not by software chauffeurs but by human ones. The other is to admit that making the modern digital world seem as luxurious as the ancient British carmaking one is just not possible as of yet. Nothing in the car looks less opulent than the 8-inch touchscreen, a necessity for owners who need Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, even though it looks as out of place in the Bentley’s dash as a Little Trees air freshener.
So instead of playing to tech, Bentley plans to stand athwart history with its scores of British woodworkers and leathersmiths and play to its handmade history. The cross-stiching on the seats is perfectly matched because instead of relying on a machine, a leather worker spent 30-odd hours spacing them by hand. Same for the burled walnut inlays, pattern-matched so that the trim mirrors itself on either side of the interior by eyes trained for decades in Crewe, England. Inside that factory, 3,400 workers toil in a setting that’s modern but far less automated than any other in the world of its size. A typical single task in a modern car factory has an average time measured in seconds; at Crewe, the average task takes 123 minutes. Each Mulsanne will be the product of 400 hours of labor, a total that would bring shame upon the household of a Toyota factory manager.
And that may be Bentley’s path to survival. The company under CEO Wolfgang Durheimer has boomed; the new Bentayga SUV now leaving the factory will push production past 12,000 cars a year, a massive number for something that requires quite so much labor. We don’t like to think about the thousands of anonymous hands that make our digital products, and the relentless march of tech means their half-life can be measured in months. As cars become more digital and roboticized, both in driving and production, they too seem more disposable and anonymous. The very word “digital” comes from how we once counted on our fingers, and with the Mulsanne, Bentley wants to demonstrate how the most opulent car in the world can stand for a different, and ancient, idea of digital luxury.
The extended-wheelbase edition of the 2016 Mulsanne.
The new face with adaptive LED headlamps.
The Mulsanne Speed in stretched form.
2016 Bentley Mulsanne2016 Bentley Mulsanne
Note the new “B” tail lamps
Interior of the Mulsanne, which can be customized in 24 shades of leather.
The new touchscreen in the Mulsanne.
In the extended-wheelbase version, the rear seats recline with a swing-out footrest.
Yes, you can order your Mulsanne with a champagne chiller between the seats.
The Bentley touchpad, two of which come free with every Mulsanne.
Grille of the new Mulsanne
Headlamps of the new Mulsanne
