Bentley Mulsanne (2010): new CAR review

The new Bentley Mulsanne will cost from £220,000 in the UK, much closer to a Rolls-Royce Ghost than the Phantom. At 5.5m, it’s also closer in size to the 5.4m Ghost than the 5.8m Phantom, but at 2585kg around the same weight as the aluminium Phantom and 150kg heavier than the steel Ghost.

Bentley Mulsanne: the numbers game

Such numbers are useful because it’s difficult to gauge the Mulsanne’s scale from photographs. Plainly, it’s a colossal car. But its styling doesn’t give it the presence of either Rolls-Royce; its proportions are more conventional and it lacks their modernity, originality and mild shock on first acquaintance.

The Mulsanne is best from the rear three-quarters, where it echoes the full, confident, blocky yet elegant lines first seen on the Brooklands. But the front end, with its low-set lamps, looks slightly doleful and apologetic; even in these straightened times, the two and a half tonnes of Crewe magnificence that follows behind deserves to be announced with more pomp and pride.

And inside the 2010 Bentley Mulsanne?

Straight into the rear seats; the Mulsanne is a car to be driven in as much as to drive. Immediately you see the reason to choose one over a Flying Spur. Although the lesser Bentley four-door offers a comparable and impressive amount of lounging room, and you can’t get your feet very far under the Mulsanne’s front seats, the Flying Spur just feels like a car, albeit a very luxurious one. The Mulsanne feels like a country-house library or the chamber of the House of Commons, with inlaid wood and overstuffed upholstery of a heft and quality that seems mildly out of place but very welcome in an object designed to move.

The front cabin is less successful. It has same great expanses of veneer and leather, great seat comfort and a sensational view down the long central crease of the bonnet to the winged B. But the layout looks a little staid after the Ghost’s, there’s a messy profusion of black plastic switchgear in the central console and the instrument binnacle is busy and tightly packed.

How does the Mulsanne drive?

None of this bothers you much when you first get the keys, of course; you’re more interested in finding out what one of the few cars with a four-figure output feels like to drive. In this case it’s torque: 1020Nm, or 725lb ft, delivered at just 1750rpm, with the peak 505bhp coming at 4200rpm, just 300 short of the change-up point.

This new 6.75-litre, twin-turbo V8 shares all its fundamental dimensions – capacity, bore centres – with Bentley’s ancient ‘six and three-quarter’; they wanted the same overwhelming torque that configuration has provided for 50 years, but incorporating new, lighter internals, variable cam-phasing and cylinder deactivation for better economy and emissions meant redesigning the block. So the numbers are the same but the engine is new, and it drives the rear wheels through an equally modern ZF eight-speed automatic gearbox.

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