What's not to love in a Bentley Mulsanne Speed?

There’s a pub in Cheshire County, England, called the Cheshire Cat, where a grinning image of Lewis Carroll’s famous feline entices motorists in for a pint or a pie. Further south down Whitchurch Road is the gate to Bolesworth Castle, which is not the Downton Abbey set, but pretty close. “It’s called orange flame,” says Bentley’s James Barlow, talking over his shoulder from the front seat. It’s also with a cool <a href="http://www.eonon.com/Car-GPS-Navigations/Android-Car-GPS.html">android car dvd</a>. “Go on,” he encourages, “have a good fiddle back there.”

And there’s much to fiddle with here — automatic mesh window shades for the rear and sides, headrest consoles for the <a href="http://www.eonon.com/">car dvd gps</a>, or satellite radio, seatback “picnic tables” stocked with iPads, kneading massage settings in the seats, a built-in champagne chiller. “There’s about £50,000 worth of extras built in,” says James. And that’s above the already-prohibitive £250,000 price tag. But once you’ve been taken through the factory in Crewe, about 40 miles south-west of all this referential English culture, these numbers start to make sense.

Run your fingers along the seams of your seat. If you’re driving a Mulsanne you’ve purchased for yourself, you will have chosen the colour of that stitching, which is also around the headrests, the gear shift and the steering wheel. You would have chosen all this from over a million available custom colour schemes. There’s a guy, on a stool, and it takes him 36 hours to sew a full Mulsanne. Add to that the five hours it takes for another person who’s already had a year’s practice to stretch and stitch the leather around the steering wheel. When you step onto the factory floor of the Mulsanne line and stroll around the stations required to go from naked chassis to full Bentley and see the custom wood and leather you’ve chosen for your interiors preinstallation, no matter what the hues, they’ll pop in contrast to the factory’s clinical whiteness. It’s like a hospital, or Willy Wonka’s TV studio. Not that they’ll let you film anything in there.

There’s a whole separate section in another building where the 14 European bull hides needed to upholster each Mulsanne are treated, ensuring you’ll have that “new car smell” times a thousand long after the car gets old. Across another alley on site, there’s over £30,000 worth of veneers in the woodshop’s storage vault at any given time, and a team of apprentices nearby are hard at training to perfect those signature paper-thin inlays for the dashboard and the door panels. That part of the factory smells like what you’d imagine as paradise for Queen Elizabeth’s baby gryphon, the one she keeps in the basement of Buckingham Palace - or just anyone who likes the smell of wood.

Because this is all Bentley’s deal: customizing everything. The leather and the wood. And they like metal. A lot. “You see this bit here?” — the Mulsanne’s lead interior designer, George Bowen, had pointed out earlier in the day — “right there beside the gearshift? Feel how cold it is.” No el cheapo plastic for these guys. (Well, there is one plastic part but George said he’s working on being able to produce it in glass and maintain quality so let’s let him try and take care of that before we call anyone out on it.) Almost as an aside, George explained that when you’re in the driver’s seat, your downward line of sight is not flush to the door panels, so he moved them down 2 millimetres to keep the driver’s sightlines continuous. “Can you see the difference?” he asked. I wasn’t quite sure I could, but I wasn’t going to argue with the guy who took three months to get the curve in the dashboard right. “It might be a bit of an OCD thing,” he joked.

Do you want to drive now?” asks James, just as I’ve begun thinking of ways I could survive without ever leaving this back seat. I feel like we should at least figure out where the closest off-licence would be to get some bubbly into its compartment. This is the quintessence of stately British fantasy here, being languidly chauffeured around the countryside, because when you’re in the back seat of one of these, you shouldn’t have to move too fast for anyone. My fantasy would have included a man named Jeeves, not James, but I’m not complaining. 

And also, we should be clear, this is not only a Mulsanne but a Mulsanne Speed, which means you can move from cruising lord to drag racer in the time it takes to switch to the driver’s seat. Once you’re up there, you’re looking at 0 to 60mph in 4.9 seconds. If you wish to accomplish this feat on Cheshire’s curvy lanes, five seconds is about the time before you’ll be testing the sports car handling on this tank-like sedan, and likely nodding in approval. If you’ve got a decent straightaway, the Mulsanne’s V8 6.75-litre engine will propel you to a top speed of 200mph. And with all this weight capable of travelling at such speeds on our good 60-mile tear, the gas gauge has only gone down about 20 per cent by the time we circle back towards Crewe. Not that fuel economy is likley to be a deal-breaker for anyone looking to buy one of these monsters.

We’ve been driving for about 90 minutes when we pull back in front of the factory, where “a Mulsanne is completed every 86 minutes,” says Nick Still, Mulsanne production manager. Which means there’s a chance a shiny new Bentley may have just come off the assembly line, been quality checked inside and out, and run through “the Monsoon room” for leaks. There’s only a ten per cent chance it’ll stay in the UK – about 85 per cent of Bentley’s business is overseas, mainly the US and China. And though India isn’t much of that last five per cent, I joke, “You know, Nick, you could always just send me one in Mumbai if you want some real monsoon testing.”

Nick laughs with enough incredulity that I ditch even my comparably moderate second idea, which is to ask if we can at least swing back to the gates of Bolesworth Castle, just to see, when we showed up in our orange Bentley, if we could gain passage up to the main house. If any car（with the <a href="http://www.eonon.com/">car dvd player</a>） could be a free pass to a listed estate… And if not, we could at least play Mad Hatter at the Cheshire Cat pub for a while to make up for it. Or we could always just load up the Mulsanne’s champagne cooler and see where we end up when the stocks need to be refilled. Any of those outings would make for some exemplary English custom.