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The ultimate luxury icons are put to the supreme test.
Where better to test these two very expensive cars from exalted old-money British companies (now owned by Germans), we asked ourselves, than California’s Highway 49 through the fabled Gold Country? Winding roads, vineyards, restored mining towns and the clinging aura of huge fortunes made and lost, of sudden good luck and dynastic fortunes established. Old money mixed with new. Quite symbolic.
And let’s admit that once you spend more than about $25,000 on a car, part of its value almost always becomes symbolic rather than purely rational. And the more you spend beyond that, the greater the mythical content, so to speak. Add another $200K or $300K to that figure and people grow just a little quiet around your car and start to ponder its larger meaning, as if visiting the Pyramids or the Sphinx. And some like to return home from the Nile with souvenirs. We could see it on this trip.
Consider the lovely “Spirit of Ecstasy” hood ornament that adorned our Rolls-Royce Ghost test car. These things have been broken off and stolen so often that Rolls engineers have now installed the old girl on a pedestal that disappears under a small hatch any time you hit the lock button on the key fob. You can also raise or retract it with the touch of a menu button in the console.
Good idea.
When we left to test-drive these two cars on a 3-day outing from our Newport Beach offices north to the Mother Lode, we decided to beat L.A.’s rush (?) hour by leaving in the morning darkness, speeding over Tejon Pass and rendezvousing for breakfast at a restaurant in Grapevine.
I got there a little earlier than Managing Editor Andrew Bornhop and his Bentley, so I stayed in the driver’s seat, writing a few notes. Moments later, a restaurant patron strolled past the Rolls, then stopped in his tracks and came back. He looked the car over, then came right up to the Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament and stared at it. Hard. A little too hard for my own custodial comfort.
Suddenly he realized I was sitting in the car, flinched visibly and left quickly in a straight line, like a man who’d accidentally bounced off an unseen tree and hoped no one had noticed. I lowered the statue and continued writing. The man’s intentions may have been good—pure curiosity or admiration—but he made me feel like a guard in an art museum. This isn’t a feeling I have in many other cars.
No, indeed. These two are different.
Besides having historically resonant names, they’re expensive. The Ghost has a Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price, as tested, of $308,350 (including a $9950 “Rear theater configuration” and $6000 for “Individual Lounge Seat configuration”), while the Flying Spur Speed can be enticed to leave the showroom for a mere $226,485, its most expensive option being a $6900 NAIM Premium Audio System.
Second, they’re large—yet sporty for their type—and have a lot of horsepower. The 5495-lb. Rolls-Royce, borrowing some 7 Series architecture from its BMW mother company, has a new and exclusive aluminum alloy 6.6-liter 48-valve 60-degree twin-turbo V-12 rated at 563 bhp. All that power goes to the rear wheels only, through an 8-speed electronically controlled transmission. No flashy F1 paddle shifters here; the gearshift is a rather delicate lever on the steering column, and one need only select Drive to be transported quietly and with crushing quickness into the distance. It’s as if you’d set the Queen Mary in motion by stirring the olive in your martini. And rightly so!
The Flying Spur Speed, meanwhile, propels its 5575 lb. with 600 bhp of twin-turbo 6.0-liter W-12 (picture two narrow-angle V-6s sharing a crankshaft) descended from the VW Phaeton. There’s also a standard, non-Speed version that makes only 552 bhp, but we needn’t trouble ourselves about that. The Spur has a 6-speed transmission with both paddle shifters and a standard console-mounted lever, feeding all four wheels through a Torsen center differential.
So these cars both have plenty of wallop under the hood, but they deliver it in slightly different ways. The Rolls delivers power almost like a steam engine, moving out with instant, uninterrupted torque at any speed with just a touch of the throttle. Very smooth, quiet and strong, without a hint of driveline lash. The Bentley thinks for a few milliseconds, selects a gear, crouches and then rushes down the road in a flurry of revs and heady acceleration. Both cars are immensely fast and the Bentley makes more horsepower, but the tight, seamless power delivery of the Rolls makes it easier to drive smoothly on winding roads where you’re off and on the throttle.
And—after an extended freeway drone up through California’s Central Valley—we hit plenty of tight winding roads when we finally turned off into the Sierra foothills and the Gold Fields on Highways 49 and 4, well watered and green with recent spring rains. It even snowed a bit the night we got to the little restored mining town of Murphys in Calaveras County. Mark Twain country. We passed his cabin on the way to Murphys.
On those beautiful back roads, more differences cropped up between our two celebrated cars.
When you climb out of the Rolls and into the Bentley, it immediately feels smaller, lower and tighter, more like a high-performance sport sedan than a luxury car. The steering is responsive and the height-adjustable suspension is stiffer and flatter under hard cornering. But it’s also a bit harsher on the rougher back roads, even with the 4-way damping switch set to the Comfort position. When you drive the Bentley, you tend to remember the Rolls as taller, softer and a bit more trundling. Which it is.
But when you jump back in the Ghost, it warms a slightly different part of your heart. The steering, for such a large, heavy luxury car, is surprisingly communicative and direct, and ride quality is forgiving and compliant without being overly soft. The Rolls heels over and leans more than the Bentley in hard corners, yet still maintains a pleasant level of tautness in transitions.
Rolls positions this car as a sporting, non-chauffeur-driven alternative to the larger and more traditionally plush Phantom, and its dynamics are pretty much on target. It still feels like a Rolls, but it’s a fun and agile Rolls. And the horsepower is right there, ready to drive the car out of a corner without hesitation. Our drag strip and slalom numbers bear out these impressions; the Bentley’s a bit quicker around the skidpad and through the slalom, and it’s also quicker off the line and reaching 60 mph, but the two cars have identical quarter-mile times, and the Rolls has a higher trap speed. You might say the Bentley has its hair on fire while the Rolls smolders—albeit at a very high temperature.
Beyond raw performance, luxury in our age stresses “features,” and both cars throw more systems, menus, toggles and buttons at you than a 4-engine bomber, so full enjoyment of either involves a good session with the owner’s manual or a training video. Some of the controls are obvious, while others seem a needless reinvention of the wheel. Of the two, the Rolls is a bit more intuitive, with—for example—a simpler, easier-to-use set of a/c/heater controls, but it also has a few irritants. While reaching for the tiny gearshift lever, for instance, we kept hitting the nearby wiper/washer lever. Also, as-delivered settings meant we had to pull the door latches twice (maddeningly) to open the door. The huge side mirrors also block your view while turning into driveways or tight corners. And the Rolls also has a turn signal stalk with no detent, so you keep flipping on your right signal while trying to cancel the left during lane changes. Then back to right. Meanwhile, a cop follows you and thinks you’re trying to be funny. Or drunk.
Full Story: 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost vs. 2010 Bentley Continental Flying Spur Speed - Article - RoadandTrack.com
Video: Rolls-Royce Ghost vs. Bentley Continental Flying Spur Speed Comparison Test - Article - RoadandTrack.com
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