Does this overpriced "Bentley" worth it? Limited to only 12 of these, the Bentley Mulliner Bacalar was launched in March 2020 and was eventually sold out.
The Bentley Mulliner Bacalar was launched in March 2020 and the production was on its way until the Covid hit. But the company announced that this million-dollar car will go under production next month.
The cost? Well, it’s all relative at this end of the market. The Bacalar starts at £1.5 million, with a significant proportion of the 12 examples being specced closer to £2m by the time all the customer’s extra personalization touches are added. Hardly cheap, but given that customers are optioning approaching half a million quid onto the car, it would seem to indicate that Bentley judged the base cost correctly.
We should point out that the car in these pictures is not one of the 12. This is Car Zero, an engineering development vehicle that has undergone a rigorous test schedule (more on that shortly) but is also largely what customers will receive from the middle of this year onwards.
Customization option such as of Bentley Mulliner is available. The Coachbuilder option where the customer can customization totally in a different way same as Mulliner. More recently, Mulliner has three arms within Bentley - the Classic (where it's building recreation icons like the Blower), the Collections (where customers can spec personalization options like unique paint or different wood veneers), and the Coachbuilt (where Mulliner will build entirely different versions of the series-production vehicles).
Speaking of the Interior, as ever with a Bentley, the wood is an important part of the experience. In the Bacalar, it’s 5000-year-old Riverwood, a dark timber that’s been sat at the bottom of a bog in the Fens for quite a few years. It’s beautiful, with tactility and quality that no man-made material can ever match. The open-pore upper section is particularly striking.
Sweeping around the center dash and into the doors is a section of grey natural wool cloth. It also appears in the seat inserts, seatbacks, and side of the head restraints. Like the wood, it’s a touch-friendly material that demands you run your hand along with it every time you jump in the car.
With the Riverwood and wool, along with rice husk used in the paint, Bentley is keen to emphasize its sustainability tilt. It’s good that the firm is trying, but it does feel a bit like greenwashing. The Bacalar runs a 650bhp twin-turbo 6.0-liter W12 petrol engine: no amount of rice husks is going to offset that.
As such, it’s now 650bhp as opposed to 626bhp, while torque remains the same at an impressive 664lb-ft, but it’s a struggle to tell any difference. It’s a blisteringly rapid car and feels more than capable of the claimed 200mph-plus top speed. There’s no sudden urge to alert you to the fact that you’re doing silly speeds, just a gradual, but unrelenting, wave that means you approach figures well north of 100mph without really realizing you’re doing so. Bentley hasn’t revealed the 0-62mph time, but given the Bacalar’s increased power but poorer aero, the Conti GT’s figure of 3.8sec feels about right.
-by Amaan Attar
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