Bentley Continental GT Mulliner - long-term review

Because this Continental GT is a ‘Mulliner’, it’s not like the other Bentleys. It’s better – if what you prize about all else is uniqueness. Individualisation. An exclusive spec denied to ‘normal’ Bentley buyers. 

You've seen the paint, the blacked-out trim, the needlessly weatherproofed leather from a First World War fighter plane. Of course all of that was selected by Bentley’s factory to show off what it could do. But this month I’ve had chance to personalise something to Top Gear’s liking in the Conti GT. And it’s a world-first. 

Puddle-light one-upmanship has been growing in cars on the quiet. They started out as just that – a downward-facing lamp that stopped you stepping in a puddle when exiting a car after dark. Then marketing departments realised they could mutate them into something less useful and more tricksy. So, like with keys, steering wheels and door handles, they’ve been mucked about with. Mostly they shine enormous car company logos onto the floor. The worst thing about a Porsche 911 S/T? The ‘ICON OF COOL’ legend it beams onto the ground whenever you swing open its lightweight carbon door. 

But Bentley has just blown all that out of the (puddle) water. First seen on the limited-run Batur, Bentley is the only car company in the world to offer what it calls ‘light sculpture animation sequences’.

“Advanced Digital Light Processing (DLP) has been innovated to produce an animated welcome image when the door of the car is opened,” says Bentley. That’s right. You can have a moving puddle light image. For when a shimmering winged ‘B’ on the ground simply isn’t special enough, right?

So how does it work? Well in short, it’s similar tech to what you’ll find in matrix-beam projector headlights. 

"The projection system that makes this possible uses three coloured light sources projecting through five different lenses and two prisms into a highly advanced 8mm 2 Digital Micromirror Device (DMD)," explains Bentley. "The light signal is then focused through five further lenses, displaying the animation on the ground when the doors open.

"The DMD device is a small silicone chip that consists of 415,800 tiny mirrors. Through the movement of the mirrors, a moving image can be produced. The mirrors themselves are made of aluminium and are 16 microns in width – a fifth of the width of a human hair."

As the size of the mirror and hinge is so small, they can react thousands of times per second with each mirror delivering one pixel in the animation. This stuff is crisper than my TV at home. And we’re using it to send a spinning TG cog onto the floor.

Yes, much as we would’ve sniggered at using this tech to write something rude, it seemed only fitting that Top Gear’s Bentley should wear our house logo when it’s opened. We simply sent the mp4 file to Bentley, who downloaded it into the new projectors. These were fitted in no more than five minutes, though it did involve taking the entire door card off and exposing the winter duvet’s work of soundproofing that lurks inside each door. 

Because this is a Mulliner-only treatment, a price is tricky to come by. But can you put a number on driving a 770bhp Powerpoint presentation to the office?