Luxury SUV · Driven
Bentley Bentayga V8
A week between Florence and the Adriatic, on cypress-lined roads, in a car that confuses everyone who looks at it.
Cold lap · The first hour
A drawing room that has been launched at speed
Then the road climbs.
Warm lap · After a week
It is the only SUV that asks you to slow down
It earns the second look.
The Bentayga is the SUV that the rest of the segment quietly measures itself against, and it remains the SUV that the rest of the segment cannot quite become.
I picked it up at Linate, drove it south through the Apennine pass to Florence, then east across to the Adriatic and back. Six hundred and twelve kilometres in a week, most of them on roads that should not flatter a 2,400-kilogram car and somehow do. The car I had was the V8 in a deep British racing green over a saddle interior — a colour combination that on any other SUV would read as costume and on the Bentayga reads as confidence.
How it drives
It drives like nothing in its class. The Cayenne is sharper. The Urus is angrier. The Range Rover is more isolated. None of them match the way the Bentayga manages weight. There is a moment, the first time you push the V8 through a long left-hander on a road in the hills above Lucca, when the car shifts its mass deliberately and gracefully — like someone leaning into a chair. That is not how SUVs at this price tier are supposed to feel. They are supposed to feel like rooms that have been engineered into corners. The Bentayga feels like a car that has decided what to do.
The V8 is the engine to have. The W12 is being phased out, the hybrid V6 is for short-distance city use, and the V8 is the configuration in which the chassis was designed. It produces 542bhp, which is irrelevant, and 568lb-ft of torque from 1,960rpm, which is the entire point.
What’s wrong with it
Three things, none disqualifying. The infotainment is a generation behind the cabin around it — visibly so. The new MIB3 system Volkswagen Group has rolled out across the rest of the empire works better than the unit in the Bentayga, and Bentley knows this. Expect the next refresh to fix it.
The rear seats are not the destination they should be at this money. The Range Rover Autobiography rear cabin makes the Bentayga rear cabin look like a competent compromise. If you are going to be driven, this is not your car.
And it is heavy. Not in a way that hurts the drive — it does not — but in a way that hurts the conscience. A 2.4-tonne SUV is what it is. The car does not pretend otherwise.
Who this car is for
It is for the man who wants the Range Rover but has stopped wanting to look like every other man who has the Range Rover. It is for the man who wants the Cayenne but does not want to apologise for owning a Porsche SUV. It is for the man who wants a Rolls-Royce Cullinan but also wants to drive himself. The Bentayga is the answer to a question almost no other SUV asks: who is the man, exactly, who will sit in this seat for ten years?
It is also, and this matters more than any of the above, the SUV that ages best. A five-year-old Bentayga still looks like the car it is. The Cayenne dates faster. The Urus dates fastest. The Bentayga, like the Continental GT before it, holds.