The shape of true luxury in 2020
Audi vs Bentley: it’s no foregone conclusion.
What is it with me, Bentleys and the end of the world? The last time things melted down this spectacularly, in the financial crisis of 2008, my long-term test car was a used Continental GT. Driving that car at that time made me feel like a Depression-era
Woolf Barnato cruising blithely past the queues for soup kitchens in his 4.5 litre. It felt even less appropriate when my meagre life savings disappeared (temporarily, thankfully) down an Icelandic geyser. I could barely afford the fuel, and searched Yahoo for countries within driving distance but without extradition treaties to which I could abscond with the car and what remained of its residual value.
This time I had the keys to a new, third-generation Bentley Flying Spur when the crisis struck. It was delivered to my place on the day lockdown was announced. The next day an email arrived from Bentley asking if I’d look after its £168,300 car indefinitely. It was here for two months.
So naturally I’ve been asked to write a comparison between the Bentley and my long-term Audi SQ8. But the Audi didn’t get a lot of use while the Bentley was here. When you’re scouring Soviet-era supermarket shelves for flour and yeast and having your hair cut with dog clippers, you’ll make the most of whatever glamour is available, so if there was a journey to be made it was made by Bentley.
The poor SQ8 was reduced to fulfilling only the ‘U’ element of its SUV designation, occasionally hauling the bicycles, tents and barbecues required to keep kids entertained. A friend suggested that we take both cars out one night, and with their sliding sunroofs and blinding main beams go lamping for rabbits. But living on a farm with hundreds of rapidly fattening lambs, meat was the one thing we weren’t short of. Would have made an unusual twin test, though.
But when lockdown eased and Bentley’s men came in their biohazard suits to repossess the Flying Spur, I didn’t mourn its loss. The Audi is so crushingly omni-capable and so flawlessly made that even the loss of a Bentley doesn’t leave you feeling hard done by. It’s also a lot more appropriate for a scruffy father of two who lives on a farm. It certainly felt better bolted-together than the Bentley, whose cabin electronics would shut down momentarily after a pothole, and whose retractable winged-B strictly obeyed the government advice to stay inside. And although I was grateful for the Spur’s grace and space and waft, its cabin didn’t feel like something that no other car maker could do, as Bentleys once did. Too much chromed and bendy plastic, not enough knurled and polished aluminium.
Yes, criticisms like that seem irrelevant at times like this, but there wasn’t much else to think about. Along with banana bread, clapping, bog-roll shortages, Boris and Joe bloody Wicks, the fact that we had a 207mph Bentley parked outside and could barely use it will be how the kids and I remember these strangest of days.