Gadgetory

the bentley mulsanne named for a turn on the LeMond racecourse kind of a cheeky thing for a car that is some 16 feet long some three tons of girth some 700 foot-pounds of torque this in many ways is the ultimate Bentley and ours says some of the most trick tech you'll find in any backseat on earth let's drive this 2012 Mulsanne and check the tap now the ball Zen is a far less known Bentley compared to the Continental GT which is in every rap video and CEOs driveway from coast to coast and around the globe this guy's a rarer bird but has some similar athletic lines including this very coupe like D pillar back here and also this kind of powerful hunched line back here which is a Bentley signature they call it the power line or something spa tables and thousands of yards away by its very evocative giant dual headlights reaching back to the look of Bentley's in ws days and the fenders and quarter panels with all these complicated creases and shapes are largely one-piece they do some nice aluminum forming on this car McLean's can be used as a car you drive but they can also be a car in which you are driven that's where the backseat comes in phenomenal let's go to what you may think is your usual picnic table even Jaguars have these but it's not just a picnic table that is powered but if you push this button on the corner we have the optional integrated iPad with the wireless keyboard pretty slick and of course the iPad here is 3G so it's got its own connection but that's part of a theme where this is primarily clever fitment more than technology now the other interesting piece of technology in this car lives in the center console we don't have all the goodies but we do have our own climate system our own reclining massage seats and you can get a cooler back here basically a champagne fridge with a frosted glass front door that has the bottles canted in such a way that a partly consumed bottle won't spill CHP is going to love that and you've also got a remote here so you can run the front head unit I can change the channels I can change the volume I can drive the first row people nuts and this isn't even all the toys folks if you get the theater option you end up with a 15.6 inch center display that shows up here and all that ties into the cars system and to a Mac Mini they mount in the trunk and it's connected wirelessly and if that's not enough everywhere you look here and in the front nice cast metal polished ashtrays this is another world before we examine the usual technology in this Bentley let's examine the tactile technology as they like to say everything that looks like something in this car is what it looks like leather obviously is leather polish steel this is actually polished steel these look like glass covers on some of these buttons they're cold they are glass and even these little poles here for the vents they feel it they're pulling some kind of a valve back there to open the air but they're actually not they're just electric switches but they dip into them to feel like they're pulling a valve in an older car now we get to the real hardcore tech by pushing the screen button and double-oh-seven esque you get a peekaboo screen many of you will recognize that as a slightly older outtie interface 8-inch screen non-touch you've got a knob to turn here you got a little mushroom button in the middle you can move around it's just a little bit too fussy for my taste for buttons around here that correspond to four menus in the corner of the screen and then of course your dedicated buttons around it all the major media sources though are without apology you've got everything you'd want in this car bluetooth streaming am/fm with HD radio switchable satellite radio over here you've got your option for let's see a six disc CD two SD cards and then if you want to hook up other options here in this nicely lacquered lined tray you've got one of these little pigtails it goes to the Audi media interface and this one for examples for iOS devices older iOS devices of course plays DVDs as well when you're parked and you've got good meta tag information while streaming at least on my Android 4.0.4 device on our day of shooting we have the optional name audio system high-end English stuff gives us 20 speakers around the cabin 2200 watts of power however the problem with high-end audio systems that really are high resolution is they make low res sources sound even crappier I'm looking at you satellite radio rear camera is good nothing cutting edge here though it gives you some trajectory it gives you distance and you can also change it up to be for either alignment of parking oh by the way check out the TAC notice anything odd about it the redline 4500 rpm what is the UPS truck that's the kind of grunt they've built into that motor it's not about thrashing it it's about low-end torque from the get and nestled here in the bow of our bowls and is one hell of an engine 6.75 litre twin-turbo v8 doing 505 horsepower and 752 foot-pounds of torque that's enough for three normal cars you've got to have that though because this guy weighs damn near 6000 pounds yet it gets to 60 in a spritely 5.1 seconds the downside is the mpg 11:18 there is a gas guzzler tax as you might imagine and I think we're averaging about seven in the real world another interesting note about these these guys are all hand-built old Steve Brown put this one together hopefully he had a fireproof apron because when this car is running you can't touch anything north of the doors if you hit a pedestrian I'm not sure you're going to kill them or cook them oh by the way this car has cylinder deactivation it can shut a few of them down when cruising to save gas imagine what it would consume if it didn't it's a nice place to be driving this car is not so much driving even when you are at the wheel as much as it is being transported you're so separate from the world on the road which has its ups and down it has massive power of course but you've got to unbury yourself from so many gears in this automatic even when it's in sport mode like I have it now it always feels pretty not ready to run and this car porpoise is quite a bit as you get the power on forever the hood is rearing up and dropping down which is kind of a real old-school thing that said it feels light on its feet for the kind of car that it is now what this car is really about is about changing the very nature about getting from here to there the way you know it in other cars is completely different in this car you almost arrived energized from the experience of driving and I'm not make and I must also say Bentley has done a really nice job of making a cohesive design language across this cabin there's a consistency of quality feel throughout for this price there better be so in sum it's a car that transports you more than being about driving it doesn't do a whole lot for me as a driver's car that's asking a lot of it this car wants to be used as a motor car not a sports car okay we're gonna price this guy you better sit down base is 345 320 gas guzzler tax 3700 destination 25 95 to get the iPads on those powered picnic tables with keyboards and a wireless hotspot as well add thirty three six or really go CNET style and step it up to what they call the theater spec that includes a whole ipad package but also the big drop down center screen with that champagne fridge a 64 gig iPod Touch and a Mac Mini in the trunk that lives in its own electric power drawer wireless keyboard and mouse that raises the option total to fifty eight thousand dollars and now you're somewhere north of 409 you