Bentley Continental GT Mulliner - long-term review

It’s 5am, and you join me at home, prising myself out of a cosy bed 100 miles north of London, fumbling for the bedside lamp switch. Do you mind? Bit of privacy while I get dressed?

By lunchtime I need to be in the Belgian coastal town of Knokke, just north-west of Bruges, to film a last-minute smash-and-grab video on this week’s new squillionaire hypercar.

I’ll detour via West Byfleet in Surrey to pick up Jordan, one of Top Gear’s talented team of videographers. Otherwise it’d be up to me to film the Capricorn 01 Zagato on my phone, and you don’t want to watch that.

Ideally, I’ll be back home in that same comfy bed at a reasonable hour this evening, having retraced my steps to drop Jordan back home en route.

So, that’s a total of 700-ish miles across three countries in around 15 hours (including filming the new Zagato). There could be no better car patiently waiting outside in the dark than a fully charged and fuelled Continental GT.

The first leg to Surrey is the worst stint. Driving in England before the sun rises used to feel like a cheat code, a head-start on the rest of the country, but heading south there’s already too much traffic, too many smart motorways with schizophrenic signage, and several arbitrary diversions around never-ending roadworks replacing a central reservation that a squirrel bumped into nine months ago. The first 100 miles take one hundred and fifty minutes.

To maintain the will to live, I concentrate on maximising the hybrid Conti’s miles per gallon. Two jabs of the metal ‘E-mode’ button on the Bentley’s alloy centre console instruct the car to hold its battery charge until later on. Otherwise it’d cruise down the A1 and M1 on electric, at speeds of up to 81mph. Good for the average economy on the official test, but less useful in the real world where it’s more efficient to save e-power for town and use the V8 to cruise.

To be fair, the Bentley is cleverer at managing this when using the in-built sat-nav. Once the car knows where it’s going, it collaborates between the GPS, intended destination and the powertrain to manage where petrol is sipped and where batteries are discharged.

But like almost all OEM car nav systems, the Bentley’s nav doesn’t react as quickly to jams as an app like Google Maps or Waze. It doesn’t reroute as skilfully or warn of today’s new speed camera, and police helpfully lurking in lay-bys on downhill stretches. So my phone handles the route, and I manage the hybrid system myself.

Jordan’s ready on time and the Bentley is stationary for barely 60 seconds to collect him, before picking its way out onto the M25 and heading for the runway of the M20 down to Folkestone. He’s got some last-minute editing to do on another film, so I pause the podcasts so he can focus on his audio.

The silence really is marvellous. This car has a chunky frontal area punching a hole in the air. It has vast, wide tyres being pressed into the road by over 2.5 tonnes of suet pudding luxury. And a V8 of course. But it whispers along, the experience more like being aboard a modern airliner with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones tuning out the drone of the engines than being in a car. Apart from those concrete sections of the M25. Even one of the world’s finest luxury cars sounds like a fencing match between two chainsaws over that nonsense.

We lope into Channel Tunnel border control five minutes earlier than even my most optimistic estimate. Two thirds of the battery remains, and the car reports 35mpg. My 5am alarm has been soothed away by the Bentley’s consummate cruisability.

France passes in a flash of blissfully smooth, sparsely populated roads, and drivers with proper lane discipline and manners. If you ever need to drive on the continent for a vacation, trust me – the holiday starts as soon as you join the French autoroutes. I can sense the Bentley exhaling with relief as it whooshes along the glass-smooth carriageways, finally able to demonstrate how refined it can make long-distance travel.

Belgium’s normally famous for three things: posh chocolate, mayonnaise on chips and lunatic drivers who think every junction should be more fraught than Eau Rogue in a downpour. But everyone’s remarkably well behaved this morning. I rest the V8 for the final 10km as we pick our way into Knokke, with the e-motor more than beefy enough to keep pace with urban traffic, taking advantage of gaps to nip through roundabouts. It’s just after midday as we park at the filming location – and an hour of that is the time difference between Britain and France. Isn’t it immensely satisfying when a long journey goes to plan?

On the return leg that evening, as Jordan edits in the passenger seat and we enjoy sampling the six in-built massage programmes, I ponder why the Conti is such a talented long-distance car. Because let’s be honest, you don’t need 780bhp and triple glazing on a jaunt like this. Gone are the days when driving a supermini for more than the duration of a football match would leave you with tinnitus and sciatica. Most cars lap up long journeys with fewer lapses than their drivers.

Partly it’s the sumptuous seats, and partly the peace and quiet that means your body isn’t fatigued by a long stint at the wheel. But a Volvo estate has quality chairs and doesn’t make much noise. So there must be more to it. Ride comfort, naturally. It helps when a car can pretty much iron out an entire country.

But there’s something particular to the big Bentley. Something about how little effort it actually takes to drive. Because even if you’re cruising at, say, 90 miles an hour, it assures you it’s got monstrous power still in reserve. Heck, the digi-needle isn’t even halfway round the speedo yet. And because it’s so heavy, it has this inherent sense of momentum about it. It refused to be deflected by bumps, knocked off course by crosswinds, or slowed by uphill gradients. Because you don’t have to manage it or babysit anything, it’s genuinely relaxing. I feel my shoulders lowering and my jaw unclenching the longer I spend inside.

Which is why by the time I’d waved Jordan off and schlepped back up to Lincolnshire, I didn’t want to climb out. Even to get into bed.