First Drive: 2022 Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid Review

You might not like the idea of the smallest engine ever fitted to a Bentley being installed under the bonnet of its current Flying Spur flagship, and we might not either. But there are two points to be made here: first, car manufacturers have never been more mindful of the stark choice that now sits before them, namely to adapt to the new world order, or die. And as the latter really isn’t a choice at all, perhaps we should be glad that one of most blue-blooded brands is so willing to move with the times. Second, the idea may not appeal, but the reality is all that really matters. So can a Bentley limousine powered by 2.9-litre engine designed by Audi and used in its saloons, coupes and SUVs (not to mention the Porsches Cayenne, Macan and Panamera) really be worthy of the wings, at least when allied with an electric motor and accompanying battery pack?

It's an interesting sell, because not all people want a Bentley for its majestic power; some, perhaps most, are actually more interested in the image. And if the powertrain makes it more affordable to run and, crucially, tax maybe this Bentley will find itself appealing not only to its traditional (and traditional by nature) customer base, but also a whole new constituency of customer who may never have either wanted, or been able to afford a Bentley before.

You’ll often read these days of a car being based on this ‘platform’ or that. Most people reading this, for instance, will realise that a Volkswagen Golf, Seat Leon, Skoda Octavia and Audi A3 are all essentially the same car wearing different outfits. But these ‘platforms’ can be rather more flexible than that. And when it was creating the Flying Spur, Bentley faced a dilemma. Clearly it had to be based on a pre-existing architecture sourced within the VW Group to which Bentley belongs. The most logical would seem to the MLB platform from which everything from the Audi A4 to the Audi A8 is derived. It would make particular sense as, believe it or not, the Bentley Bentayga originates from the same place. But that’s not what Bentley decided. Instead it chose the rather more exclusive MSB platform used elsewhere by Porsche for the Panamera and nothing else at all. This gave Bentley a far more appropriate structure upon which to build the Continental GT, and the Flying Spur was simply spun off that.

So this long, flowing limo-like Bentley saloon is derived from a coupe-shaped Porsche and, as we will see, this confers significant benefits upon the car. Where Bentley’s designers have been so clever is to stretch, massage and cajole such an elegant shape from such raw material, a shape you could imagine being created from scratch to be a Bentley alone.

The Flying Spur is a plug-in hybrid, electrical power coming from a 136PS (100kW) electric motor that is fed from an 18.0kWh lithium ion battery pack. But it is not Bentley’s first hybrid, that honour belonging to the Bentayga SUV, which was unveiled in 2019 then updated for the facelifted Bentayga that made its debut in 2021.

So it would be reasonable to assume the Flying Spur shared the same powertrain. Reasonable, but wrong. In fact it is almost completely and significantly different. Because while both have V6 engines designed by Audi with similar capacities, the 3.0-litre engine in the Bentayga has a single turbocharger while the 2.9-litre motor is a twin-turbo unit. What this means is that despite deriving similar power from their hybrid systems, the Bentayga offers a total system output of 449PS (330kW), the Flying Spur some 544PS (400kW). And that is an enormous difference which, as we shall see, has a transformative effect on its performance.

The other crucial difference, and this derives directly from the decision to choose the Panamera platform, is that that while the Bentayga comes with a conventional eight-speed torque converter automatic gearbox, the Flying Spur comes with the same eight-speed double-clutch transmission as the Porsche.

As for the hybrid itself, it is said to offer around 33 miles of range but, like all such claims, this is based on a fairly idealised use scenario. In normal use something around 26-28 miles is probably more realistic. The car provides the usual options of allowing you to drive on electrical power alone, to hold the electric charge until you need it, or if is most advantageous to use it. Left in default ‘hybrid’ mode and so long as you have set a destination, it will liaise with the navigation system to eke out the electrical supply and use it as efficiently as possible to ensure you arrive with the electrical range at zero.

What it will not do, because Bentley says it’s an inefficient use of fuel, is allow you to use the internal combustion engine to charge the battery on the move.

If you want one key indicator of this car’s performance, and why, despite having the smallest engine fitted to a Bentley in the company’s history, it should still be taken very seriously, it is this: its acceleration on 2.9-litres and six cylinders with a hybrid drive is near identical to that a conventional Flying Spur V8 with 4.0-litres and eight cylinders.

Make no mistake, this is still a very fast car, as its 4.3-second 0-62mph sprint makes clear. Had it been fitted with the Bentayga powertrain, you could probably have added an entire second to that. But there’s more to any car’s performance than bald numbers and few where how it’s delivered is even more important than in a Bentley.

And the bad news is that if you’re really gunning it, working the V6 hard in the upper reaches of its rev range, the off-the-peg noise and ever so slightly coarse power delivery are not very Bentley experiences, particularly when compared to the gorgeous V8 alternative.

Then again, when will most Flying Spur owners drive their cars this way? It’s far more likely behaviour from a Continental GT driver, which may explain why, despite the powertrain having been available for some time now, no Continental GT hybrid has yet been produced. Drive the Spur in the way most will be driven and such concerns melt away.

Unsurprisingly it’s at its absolute best when the internal combustion engine is just a redundant lump of cold metal sitting in the nose as you’re swept along on a silent wave of electrons, for this could scarcely be more ‘Bentley’ progress. But as we know, it won’t go that far on electricity alone so it pays both literally and figuratively to think hard about how and when you’re going to use it. What it does do however is open up the prospect of Bentley motoring to journeys for which it would have never previously been considered: the school run, the weekly supermarket shop or any local errand: for not only can these be conducted in the most soothing of silence, so long as you charge at home (about 90 minutes from a standard 7kW home charger), the Spur is about as cheap to run in energy terms as a 1.0-litre city car.

And one benefit of the hybrid system is that it appears to fill in the gaps in the power delivery between gearchanges, important when there’s a double clutch gearbox doing the changing. The effect is the slur the change in much the same way achieved by a torque converter, but with no loss of shift speed or dynamism. The best of both worlds? In this regard it would seem so.

You don’t expect a car tuned for comfort, sitting on an enormous wheelbase with a kerb weight of nearly 2.5 tonnes to handle like a sportscar, even if does come from a company that won Le Mans six times. But the Spur is still a genuinely good car to drive hard, as all authentic Bentleys should be. It’s not fun in any conventional sense, but it is so composed, so accurate, so good at controlling its body movements it’s never less than genuinely pleasant to aim along a curving coastline and often highly satisfying.

It is important to remember that, while the Flying Spur is now the Bentley flagship, it’s priced below the entry point to Rolls-Royce ownership, so it is not as if the two brands, rivals for a century when both under the same roof and not, are any more in direct competition with each other. Nor will they be until Bentley launches the all-electric replacement for the sadly defunct Mulsanne in 2025.

Even so, the inside of the Flying Spur remains a place of sumptuous luxury, whichever seat you decide to occupy. Bentley still builds the best seats in the world and with superlative ride comfort on triple-chamber air springs and superb sound deadening, you can put 200 miles under its wheels in a single hit and feel neither the need nor the desire to take a break.

And of course all that is before you start optioning in expensive goodies, either as part of the normal list of extras, or from Bentley’s Mulliner personal commissioning department. Spending half as much again as you did on the car really isn’t very difficult and bespoke, extraordinary specifications can be achieved. If it lacks anything, it is that hewn from oak feeling you had in a Mulsanne. The car feels strong and conspicuously well built, entirely commensurate with the price charged, but it still feels like the car it is: a relatively large volume car produced in an efficient manner. That sense of glorious, almost excessive over-engineering, where the feel of the car from the way from the ways its doors close to the obsessiveness of its detailing belongs to another car at another price. The Mulsanne had it, and it is to be hoped its belated replacement will do so again.

Bentley’s first crack at a hybrid saloon comes with a lot of questions, for most of which it offers convincing answers. The performance is there, and if the V6 takes away a little sense of occasion at one end of the performance envelope, there’s no question that the all-electric mode at the other more than replaces the shortfall.

This is not a Bentley for those who wish to brag about the number of cylinders or litres at their disposal, but those who want all the hallmarks of Bentley design and engineering integrity in a form that makes far more financial sense than any other petrol-powered Bentley in history, both in running and taxation terms.

The only outstanding question is why Bentley chose not to use the monster V8 hybrid powertrain that also exists within the group. And the answer to which no Bentley employee will admit in public is that when the W12 – which is now in its 20^th year – takes its final bow, it will be likely be the V8 hybrid that replaces it until Bentley become an exclusively EV manufacturer in 2030.