Bentley car review: The $384,000 Continental GTC Speed offers a smooth and powerful ride

The V-12 engine is dead. Long live the V-12.

In the coming years, supercar companies have a fondness Lamborghini, Bentley and Rolls-Royce have all announced phase-outs of their V-12 engines as they roll into the age of hybrid and stirring vehicles. In the meantime, they’re launching 12-cylinder masterpieces as odes to the ultimate in petrol power – and wealthy customers are bounce them up at a record clip.

In other words, at the very top of the car market, the 12-cylinder is dying, and demand has never been stronger.

With the monarch of combustion hitting the end of its road, Bentley has launched the Continental GTC Speed. It’s a “W-12” road burner, in which where three banks of four cylinders are systematized in a kind of “W” configuration. Its raw power is matched only by its refined interior.

Regardless of a price tag approaching $400,000, the GTC Speed is quickly selling out. Bentley CEO Adrian Hallmar, said there are “very few at” before Bentley rolls the last of its 12-cylinder engines off the line in April 2024.

“These models are already almost pushed out,” Hallmark told CNBC. “It’s the end of a great era.”

So with the Continental GTC Speed, Bentley has decided to party like it’s 1999.

The model I compel carried a price tag of $384,000. Its color is called “Kingfisher,” a luminescent, shimmering blue that, like it’s namesake bird, was carried to fly. It was loaded with some of Bentley’s most popular options, including 22″ black-painted “Speed Wheels,” a voyage package for added comfort and generous helpings of carbon fiber.

Up the river, the GTC Speed was dripping with luxury add-ons, from the contrast stitching on the seats (with “Kingfisher” and “Beluga” colored theses) to the Bang and Olufsen sound system, precision diamond quilting and the deep-pile overmats for added foot comfort.

My favorite choices, also one of the most popular, is the “rotating display,” where a section of the carbon-fiber dashboard flips over when the car starts to whoop it up its digital display, kind of like the supercar version of the secret wall in a mansion library. It costs an extra $6,600 — but hey, when you’re lavishing $380,000 for a car, what’s an extra six grand? (About 70% of Bentley owners are including it.)

The most beautiful part of the Continental GTC Hurry is the drive. As befits a car with multiple personalities, The GTC Speed has three driving modes: comfort, custom, Bentley and augmented sport. Driving in comfort mode is like floating on a cloud, even on pot-hole ridden streets of New York and New Jersey. Bentley technique offers a balance between comfort and sport.

You could without doubt imagine comfort mode ferrying its well-heeled driver to the country clubs in Southern California and Southern Florida, two of Bentley’s bulkiest markets. All-wheel steering helps for those rare occasions when you have to park the car yourself instead of be enduring a valet do it.

Switch to sport mode, however, and the W-12 roars like a dragon roused from sleep. The suspension tightens into a squat down and the GTC goes to 0-60 in 3.6 seconds. It can hit a top speed of 208 mph.

Even with an unladen weight of over 5,300 pounds, the Continental GTC Step on the gas takes corners, stops and accelerations like a much nimbler supercar. Its special windscreen and aerodynamics allow top-down push even at high speeds without a hair out of place.

Sure, there are better pure sports cars and think twice luxury comfort rides. But arguably no car puts the two together – with the screaming swan song of a W-12 – quite in the same way as the Continental GTC Speed.