The 2020 Bentley Flying Spur Is a $275,000 Ultra-Luxury Sedan

This is the new 2020 Bentley Flying Spur and it is the newest sedan from Bentley. It's powerful, beautiful and of course tremendously expensive. This one has a sticker price of just under $275,000. But with that price comes immense opulent luxury and features and today I'm going to review this car and show you everything. I've borrowed this Flying Spur from O'Gara San Diego which is Bentley San Diego, the Bentley dealership here in the San Diego area. Of course Bentley San Diego has all of the latest Bentley models, the new Continental GT and GTC, the Bentayga and now this, the new Flying Spur which is just starting to go on sale at dealerships nationwide. So let's talk Flying Spur. This car first went on sale back in 2006 as the Continental Flying Spur. It was a four-door sedan version of the new Bentley Continental GT Coupe. But as buyer tastes shifted away from two-door cars, the Flying Spur quickly became more popular than the Continental GT. So Bentley split it off into its own Flying Spur model for the 2014 model year. For 2020 the Flying Spur is completely redesigned. So it's an all-new car and while a V8 model is surely on the way in the future, right now you can only get it with a twin turbo 12-cylinder that makes about 625 horsepower and about 665 pound-feet of torque. Those are huge numbers and they send this car from 0 to 60 in 3.6 seconds and to a top speed of 207 miles per hour, meaning that this giant luxury sedan has a higher top speed than the Ferrari F40. Think about that. The other big news about the 2020 Flying Spur is that it's bigger than before. Five inches longer than the outgoing model, which means more interior space and more room for crazy luxury items. So today I'm going to review this car and show them to you. First I'm going to take you on a tour of the new Flying Spur and show you all of its interesting quirks and features. Then I'm going to get it out on the road and drive it and then I'm going to give it a Doug score. All right, I'm going to start the quirks and features of the new Flying Spur in the interior, which is truly beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. All the materials, the finishes, the style, the design. This is honestly one of the most beautiful car interiors I have ever been inside in my entire life. It is just an unbelievable focus on perfection, quality, luxury. I love it in here. It is gorgeous. One example of something really cool, check out this white area that starts sort of in the passenger side footwell by the glove box, and then it continues down the passenger door panel, then next to the seat on the pillar, and then into the back seat. This same white trim in the interior carried from the front to the side to the back, completely unbroken. Everything is tied together and beautiful and opulent and just incredible interior in this car. And next up, I want to talk about some of this car's particularly exciting opulent luxury features, and that means starting with the center screen. Now, you look at the screen and it just looks like a center screen like in basically every other car, but you press this little button that says screen, and then it does a flip, and suddenly it's showing you dials instead of a screen. And those dials show you the outside temperature, the compass, what direction you're heading, and the last one is actually a stopwatch in case you want to take your Bentley out on the racetrack. Now, you press screen again and it flips right back to showing you the screen with all of your infotainment controls like you might expect, and you can just press it and watch it flip and flip, and it is very addictive. One thing I like is when it's on the panel with the gauges, you can see the trim just continues through the wood, the aluminum, the black, so it almost looks like it's not a rotating panel at all, but rather just part of the dashboard. You never even notice that it can flip until it does its little trick. Now, interestingly, this panel can actually flip in a third way. When you turn off the car, you can see it flips from whatever you had it set to to nothing, just a blank panel, so no one can tell you even have a screen in here. And then when you turn the car back on, the panel flips right back into place to whatever you had it set to before. So you have a triangular flipping screen panel in the center of your Bentley, although it isn't free. In fact, this option costs $6,400 extra for your little screen flippers, although it's worth noting that in this Bentley, it was free as part of the $45,000 first edition package celebrating some of the very first examples of these flying spur models. And next step, moving on to some other exciting luxury features, I wanna talk about this little switch in the center console off to the right. You pull that switch and it opens all of the sunshades, and there are a lot of them. Take a look and you can see everything opening up with the pull of that switch in back, so you can go from a cocoon for your rear passengers blocked from the sun, fully private, to completely open with the push of one button. Of course, if you have all the sunshades open and you want that privacy, you just pull the switch again, and then everything closes right up. And then as you can see, all the sunshades close and the cocoon in back is completely in place. And next up, another high-end luxury feature, this car has heated and cooled seats, of course. You can control them with these little buttons, turn them on, nothing unusual there. But when you turn on the heated or cooled seats, a little icon pops up on the center screen that gives you the option to turn on auto. So what is that? Well, you've heard of automatic climate control. This car offers automatic seat climate control, and if you turn on auto, it will heat or cool your butt depending on whether it feels that it's too warm or too cool. You don't even have to set your own heated or cooled seats in this car. It will turn that stuff on for you depending on the temperature. And next up, another nice little touch in this center console is the temperature and fan speed dials. Right now, you can see this little dial adjusts the temperature. So I turn it and it changes the climate control temp. That's pretty standard. But as you look at these center console buttons, you may be wondering, how do you change the fan speed? There's not a separate dial for that. Is this one of those things they've integrated into the screen? It's very annoying. Well, no, it turns out you press this little button that looks like a fan, and then your climate control temp dial has become a fan speed dial temporarily. You can adjust it and it changes the fan speed. If you press the little fan button again, it goes back to being the climate control temperature dial. So one dial, two purposes, and that allows them to clean up this center control stack and means they don't have to integrate this important function into some menu in the screen. Pretty cool. And next up, back to the controls in the center console. Another one I like is the drive mode dial. In the very center, you can see the engine start stop button, but it's surrounded by a dial that adjusts the drive motor. You can see when you turn this dial, it switches between the different drive modes printed above the dial. I really like how they've integrated this and how it looks. The drive mode dial is just beautiful with this like crystal look on the outside. Same thing goes for the fan speed temperature adjustment dial, this crystal look. It's just far more luxurious, attractive, beautiful than you would think a simple climate control and drive mode dial should be. And in terms of beautiful finishes, it absolutely does not stop there. It's everywhere in this car. One great example, the stalks coming off the steering column. Look at this turn signal stalk. It is so beautiful. The aluminum, the silver finish, the end is this diamond display, just gorgeous. And same deal with the wiper stalk, an absolutely beautiful look. These are some of the best turn signal and wiper stalks in the car industry. And speaking of high quality in here on the door panel, you can see that there's a very noticeable speaker. This is part of the name audio system that comes with this car for an additional $8,800 over the standard sound system, almost nine grand for an upgraded stereo, but I suspect it sounds pretty nice. And next step, I want to move into the center screen to discuss some more luxury features, like for example, the massaging seats. Your car probably doesn't have massaging seats. This one has them and they have five different types of massage that you can get while you're simply driving down the road. And as if that wasn't enough, you can choose between five different intensities of massage, not just on or off, but five different levels of massage intensity from this car for both the driver and passenger seats. And speaking of seat comfort, the rear seats in this car are heated, of course, no surprise, but in the infotainment screen, you can also configure whether you want the arm rest heating to turn on and back with the heated seats. So you don't just get a heated seat back there. You have that setting in place when you turn on your heated rear seat, you also get a heated rear arm rest. So your elbow and your arm is warmed in addition to your butt. And another upscale touch in this car, if you look at the front, you can see there is a big bee hood ornament up there. That's the hood ornament version of the flying bee logo with wings. The cool thing is you can raise or lower it from the center screen. Although Bentley doesn't call it raise or lower, but instead reveal and conceal, more luxurious words that mean the same thing. But as you can see, if you press conceal, the bee logo retracts into the front end, I guess making this car appear a little bit more subtle, flies under the radar a little bit more than if the hood ornament was in place. If you press reveal, the opposite happens. The hood ornament pops right back up, and then everyone knows once again that you're driving a Bentley. And next up, two more notable items up front in this interior. One is this British flag logo on the passenger side of the dashboard, except you can see the vertical part is the number one. That's because this is a first edition model. Like I've mentioned, some of the very first flying spurs on this new body style that are all built about the same way with basically every option. The other unusual detail up here is the front windows. You can see the windows look fairly normal until you get down to the very front most point where there's a tiny little additional window. I guess Bentley had to put that fixed piece in here to make sure that the rest of the window can roll all the way down, and there's not a part that's sticking up. But what a small, weird little afterthought looking thing. That's got to be one of the tiniest automotive windows in production today. What a strange piece. And next we move on to the back seat where there is a lot more luxury and opulence, starting with the headrest pillows. Take a look at these fluffy pillows. A normal headrest is not enough for the luxurious passengers in the back of the Bentley, so we get a pillow. And next up, another thing you notice back here immediately is that you have rear seat controls on the door. You can move the seat forward, backward, the backrest forward or backward. You can even move the headrest. But that's just the start of all the luxury back here. Go into the middle in the rear and you have a screen. And this screen allows you to control various other seat items. You can turn on the heated rear seats with this screen, for example, or you can turn on the cooled rear seats, or you can turn on the massaging rear seats. And you have all of the same massaging options from the front delivered into the back. So riding as a rear seat passenger in this car doesn't mean you get any less massaging. But this center screen can do so much more than just control your seat comfort. For one thing, it can drop the Bentley B hood ornament just like the front screen. You can conceal or reveal it back here. You don't have to be a front seat passenger. The back passengers can decide if the hood ornament goes up or down. And it goes on from there. You can use this rear screen to change the ambient interior lighting, the color, the intensity, and not just for the back seats, but for the entire car. You can use this rear screen to change the media. So what radio station or music player you're listening to, you can adjust that back here. You can use this rear screen for navigation. If you want to enter a navigation destination back here and then have it sent to the front screen so your driver knows where to take you, you can do that using this little screen in the back. And check this out. This little rear screen in the back also lets you control all of the blinds. Just like that switch I showed you up front, well here you can open or close all of the sun blinds in back with this screen. And you can do them individually. You can go to each blind, open or close it if you want to on this screen. So this screen basically provides full functionality. The only thing you really can't do is turn on or off the car safety systems that's left for the driver, but everything else that you can do up front, you can also do back here. And by the way, it's worth noting that you don't have to go into the screen to adjust the blinds. There are easier controls for most of them. One I want to highlight is the blind above you because this car has a giant glass sunroof situation. On the outside you can see there's just two big glass panels over the entire passenger compartment. The front one opens like a traditional sunroof, but the back one is fixed in place. But you can press these buttons on the rear ceiling to open or close the sun blind over this panel, depending on exactly how much sun you want to enter your rear seat chauffeured experience. And next up, a few other notable items back here. Back here you also have mirrors that can deploy from the ceiling. You can open them up and you can look at yourself while you're being chauffeured around. Also next to the mirror, just in case you couldn't see yourself well enough in the built-in mirror light, you have a little light that you can just tap on to provide more lighting back here. Tap on, tap off, tap on. You have one of those for both rear seats. And just in case that wasn't enough lighting back here, you also have two more of these lights in the center. Tap on, tap off, same kind of thing. So you can have all sorts of different lighting going on back here. And next up, we move on to the center armrest, which isn't really all that special. You can see there's some storage in here. If you open up the larger piece, some charge ports. And if you open up the smaller compartment, you have some cup holders, but nothing really unusual there. You can also fold this center armrest back and then you have a third seat back here, a middle seat. And you also have a folding center headrest that you can extend out just in case your middle passenger wants a little bit more comfort, like they might expect from a Bentley. And next up, we move outside the flying spur, where you notice one of its most impressive luxury touches right away. And that would be the headlights, which look like crystals or jewelry, incredibly distinctive, incredibly luxurious and opulent and cool. And precisely what I'd expect a car like this to have. One other cool thing about these headlights, when you look at them, the car is on and the running lights are on, you can see it almost looks like teeth around a circle. It is a very distinctive daytime running light, headlight pattern. And I really, really like how that look is integrated into these crystal jewelry headlights. And by the way, the crystal in the headlights isn't just in the headlights up front. You may have seen earlier, it's also on the hood ornament, that winged Bentley B. The wings are also that crystal glass. And you can see they've been carved to actually make feathers to give it an even more luxurious look for people who notice little details like that. Now, as for the styling of this car, I have to say it's changed quite a bit from the outgoing model and from the original flying spur. And virtually all of the changes seem to be aimed at making it appear more stately and elegant. For one thing, they've moved forward the front wheels to give this swept back look that has previously been a characteristic of the larger Bentley sedans, the Arnage, the Mulsanne, and some vintage models. We also have a far more upright grill with this car than the previous flying spur, again, more stately, more elegant. Now, it's worth noting that this is not Bentley's most expensive sedan. That honor goes to the Mulsanne, which is the flagship model in the range. But Bentley sells basically none of the Mulsannes, way too expensive, very small market. And part of me wonders if these design changes to make the flying spur appear more stately and elegant are done with the goal of maybe one day replacing the Mulsanne, since it doesn't really sell that well. And since buyer tastes have shifted away from sedans, so maybe Bentley doesn't really feel that they need two big luxury sedans in their lineup anymore. And next up, we move around to the back of the flying spur. And I want to talk about the trunk. Although when you get back here, you can see there's no immediately obvious way to open up the trunk. Well, you can use the key, this giant, massive key, perfectly fitting of this opulent, big luxury sedan. Flip it over, and there's a little trunk button, but that's the boring way to get in the trunk. The other way is a little more hidden. You see the Bentley logo back here. Well, the little B in the center is the trunk opener button. You push it, and the trunk pops open a little hidden trunk opener. Now, when you're back here, you can see the trunk is really just a trunk. There's nothing particularly special or interesting or unusual in this trunk. It's just a trunk, reasonably large, precisely what you might expect. And finally, we move under the hood, and you can see the engine. Now, like I mentioned, a V8 model is probably on the way, but right now, this is all you can get, a turbocharged 12-cylinder. This is actually a W12, one of my very favorite engines in the entire car business because of the way it builds power, the way it feels, and the smoothness and the quietness. I love this power plant. And in this application, it makes about 625 horsepower and 665 pound-feet of torque. Like I mentioned, huge numbers, 0 to 60 in 3.6 seconds and a top speed of 207 miles per hour. Unreal numbers. This is basically supercar territory, but in a giant sedan that weighs 5,500 pounds. This is a massive vehicle that's incredibly fast thanks to this power plant. And so those are the quirks and features of the new 2020 Bentley Flying Spur. And now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives. All right, driving the new Flying Spur. And like I mentioned in the video, the first thing you notice when you get in here is just how beautiful this interior is. It is gorgeous. The materials are amazing. You get it at a Rolls-Royce that costs twice as much, and in my opinion, it is not as nice as this car or just as nice. It's just so beautiful. It really does feel like a car that costs more. And then you have the powertrain. And I just love this six-liter twin-turbo W12. It just hauls and moves this car so much. But quickly when you're in this car, you realize that it's very quiet and very comfortable, and it just feels so luxurious. The ride quality is just fantastic. Bumps are totally soaked up. The world around you is just drowned out. You don't have to think about it. Oh, the ride is so nice in this car. This is just the most wonderfully, wonderful luxury car. I like the Rolls Phantom. I really, really do. The Phantom is insane. But that's what you buy when you just want the very craziest, most ridiculous opulent. This is 95% of the Phantom for 50% of the money. But some people do want that last 5%. All right, I'm going to step on it a little here. It's so good. One of the great perks of my job is being able to accelerate hard in the Bentley W12. It really is one of my very favorite engines, and it has been for a while now. It's just fantastic. Power doesn't come on in a way that it slaps you in the face, but instead it comes on like a jet, like a little more and a little more, and then suddenly you're going really fast. It's smooth. It's all-encompassing. It probably is my very favorite engine in the car business. The steering and handling in this car has always been pretty good. I've always been relatively impressed by it. It corners reasonably flat, and it's very linear. You turn the wheel, very predictable in how it steers. The problem ends up being, of course, the handling, the body roll. It's a very large car, 5,500 pounds, an enormous vehicle. It's the Overall, this is just a great car. It's just a great all-around car. Now, sedans are kind of slowing down, and I'm a big proponent also of Bentley's SUV, the Bentayga, but if you're into sedans, this is kind of the gold standard of the opulent luxury sedan. These are quite common in upscale areas, despite their price tag, and the reason for that is they're just really good. It's kind of the car you have an S-Class, you want to graduate to the next level of opulence, luxury, and rarity, you get yourself one of these. And then above that, there's not much that you kind of look up to on the road. This is really one of the great cars, and it's just fantastic, and the latest redesign has made it even better. And so that's the 2020 Bentley Flying Spur. This is not Bentley's flagship luxury sedan. That honor goes to the larger Mulsanne, although sales of those have slowed to a trickle. Instead, this is the volume Bentley, the Bentley that most people get when they want a Bentley luxury sedan. And it's fabulous. And now it's time to give the new Flying Spur a Doug's score. Starting with the weekend categories and styling, this is a nice-looking car, and it deserves a 6 out of 10. Acceleration does 0-60 in 3.6 seconds, and it gets an 8 out of 10. Handling is sharp for a big sedan, but only average overall, and it gets a 5 out of 10. Fun factor is fine. It's fast and sort of quick to change direction, but most of the fun comes from just piloting a Bentley, and it gets a 5 out of 10. Cool factor is decent. This is a cool car because it's new and special, though they'll start to become pretty common, and it gets a 6 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 30 out of 50. Next up are the daily categories and features. It's very well equipped, though it falls short of some of the latest high-tech gadgets. Still, it easily gets an 8 out of 10. Comfort is excellent, and it earns a 9 out of 10. Same deal with quality. Truly excellent. I'm only worried about long-term reliability, and it gets a 9 out of 10. Practicality is normal for a car like this, and it gets a 5 out of 10. Finally, value. This car offers a lot, but it's also expensive, and it's going to lose value fast. It gets a 6 out of 10 for a total daily score of 37 out of 50. Added up, and the Doug's score is 67 out of 100, which places it here against other ultra-luxury cars I've reviewed. The Flying Spur falls short of the Continental GT Coupe, which does way better in the weekend categories, and the Flying Spur ties the Bentayga, which is probably its closest competitor. Ultimately, this is an excellent, competent, really gorgeous luxury sedan, and it's a fantastic effort from Bentley.