2016 Bentley Continental GT review – Roadshow

The Good Luxury coachwork and a powerful yet economical V-8 engine make the 2016 Bentley Continental GT V8 S a choice car for long drives. The Naim stereo adds to aural luxury to the driving experience.

The Bad The navigation system tracks the car too slowly, making it difficult to follow guidance with frequent turns, and its antiquated audio interface doesn’t offer a built-in USB port.

The Bottom Line Well-heeled buyers who eschew chauffeurs will find the 2016 Bentley Continental GT V8 S an engaging and powerful car, suitable for long trips, but they should consult their phones for navigation.

For British automaker Bentley, the name Continental implies Europe, where drivers can log many more miles than the distance between John ‘o Groats and Penzance, about as far as you can go in the UK without crossing seas. As such, Bentley designed the 2016 Continental GT V8 S for a trip from Plymouth to Prague, or Barcelona to Rome, likely with a stop in Monaco.

To get some sense of its long-range behavior, I took the 2016 Continental GT V8 S on a run from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and back again, traversing both the long highway and crowded urban centers.

The test brought to light the efficiency of Bentley’s powerful V-8 engine, a newer option for the still-available W-12 cylinder, the comfort of its cabin and chassis, and the accuracy of its navigation. And cruising through Los Angeles and San Francisco showed bystanders’ reaction to the Continental’s subtle styling and can’t-ignore-it Monaco Yellow paint job.

The Bentley Continental is designed for longer trips and enthusiastic driving on engaging roads.

Wayne Cunningham/Roadshow

Bentley currently offers the Continental in 10 variations, including coupes and convertibles, cruisers and a race-ready edition. The Continental GT V8 S comes in coupe layout, two doors and four seats with a metal roof overhead, and sport tuning. Base price for the Continental GT V8 S comes to $210,000, meaning that if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. A mix of styling and other options brought the US example I drove to $257,254.

Elegant muscle

The ineffable and subtle styling of the Continental looks at once simple yet striking, a lesson for automotive designers everywhere. Unadorned surrounds for headlights and air intakes up front make the car unmistakable, while a few contour lines on the sides give an impression of momentum. The body shows muscle, hinting at the power under the hood.

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Superb interior coachwork includes high-quality leather with body-colored stitching and polished metal switchgear. Double-paned glass in the side windows keeps out unwanted noise. Driving the Continental, it felt like I was sitting in an airport’s VIP lounge, a much calmer and more relaxing environment than general seating at the gate.

Bringing down the cabin refinement, plastic buttons prevailed for climate control, suspension settings and the navigation head unit.

Seemingly at odds with its nicer appointments, the Continental GT V8 S is essentially a muscle car. When I stepped into the throttle, the twin turbo 4-liter V-8 engine sounded off with a ticking growl, putting 521 horsepower and 502 pound-feet of torque to all four wheels. At over 5,000 pounds, the Continental takes a half second to get itself together, then blasts off the line, pushing you back into its seats.

The eight-speed automatic transmission, by ZF, has a creditable sport mode, able to keep the revs high and downshift aggressively.

Wayne Cunningham/Roadshow

On Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles and Skyline south of San Francisco, I experienced how that all-wheel-drive system, the Continental’s air suspension and its 20-inch Pirellis gave it nimble handling. Dropping the shift lever for the ZF eight-speed automatic transmission into Sport mode kept the engine speed high, making the throttle more responsive, and the electric power steering made for easy, precise turn-in.

The Continental isn’t the kind of car you drift around the corners — its tail stays firmly planted — instead weight and grip conspire to make hard cornering feel almost casual.

Turn-by-turn

Crawling along in LA and SF traffic, I absorbed a bit of the Continental’s panache. While it exudes presence, the subtle styling defused any ire from bystanders that might otherwise be aimed at a peacocking venture capitalist or Hollywood mogul. And the powerful engine proved perfectly manageable, letting me gently throttle off the line or maintain distance from the bumper of the car ahead.

While the Continental’s cabin furniture blunted the sting from traffic congestion, the navigation system added its own frustrations. The plastic buttons below the 8-inch touchscreen look pedestrian, not up to the coachwork’s caliber, and entering an address or looking up a location revealed the slowness of older generation electronics. I found myself double-tapping buttons when I wasn’t rewarded with immediate results. Trying to keep up with the times, Bentley adds an online search feature, shoehorned in with a search button on the map screen, but it wasn’t operational in the example I drove and would still suffer from the general system slowness.