2025 Bentley Continental GT Review: Forget About The W12

The Bentley Continental GT has been around for 22 years, and it’s spent most of that time steadily getting better. The fourth-generation car, then, has a lot of work to do to keep that upward trajectory going, especially because it’s lost what was arguably the car’s signature: its silky-smooth twin-turbo W12 engine.

Yep, that big old bruiser of an engine has made way for something (slightly) more in step with the times: a plug-in hybrid V8 setup.

It certainly doesn’t want for speed. In fact, the Speed with a capital S is currently the only available version of the new car. The V8 is the 4.0-litre twin-turbo unit found in lots of big, fast VW Group stuff, here making 592bhp. Then, sharing a housing with the eight-speed dual-clutch gearbox is a 187bhp electric motor. Peak combined output is 771bhp and 738lb ft of torque – 121bhp and 74lb ft more than the old W12 GT Speed.

Bentley says it's good for 0-62mph in 3.2 seconds, and a top end of 208mph. So yes, the Speed lives up to its name. That pace, though, arrives not with the neck-snapping whoomp that a similarly-powerful supercar would, but with a deep, stately surge. It’s a bit like being gently but steadily pushed back into your seat as an airliner powers down the runway.

Once upon a time, that sort of gradual but swelling pace would have been all a car like this needed to offer, but these days, GT cars have to be able to Go Round Corners™ too. That’s not an easy task in a car touching 2.5 tonnes, so the Conti is absolutely stuffed with chassis tech.

The list is enough to make even the geekiest of chassis engineers need a lie down. The headlines are rear-biased active all-wheel drive, dual-chamber air suspension with dual-valve springs, 48V active anti-roll control, torque vectoring and an electronic limited-slip differential.

If we were to explain how it all works, we’d wind up needing extra server space, but the net result is a car that does a remarkable job of hiding its weight. It’s one of those cars that gives physics the finger rather than working with them, but the way it stays flat and sticks to a tight line through corners is nevertheless impressive.

There’s ultimately only so much all this technology can do to hide the Continental’s sheer mass, and if you really push on, you’ll start to uncover its understeery limits. Don’t get too antisocial, though, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the Continental weighs a good 500kg less than it actually does.

The optional carbon-ceramic brakes, with enormous 440mm discs and 10-piston callipers at the front, have no issues scrubbing off the frankly alarming momentum a car like this can build up. The steering, meanwhile, is direct and reasonably talkative. In fact, these traits can occasionally make themselves known even when you don’t want them to, with particularly rutted roads and nasty cambers sometimes making the front end the slightest bit fidgety.

Those trick dampers have other benefits, namely the Continental’s superb ride comfort. Even in Sport mode, imperfections that would lead to wince-inducing thunks in other cars are reduced to mere pitter-patters. Dial it back to Comfort, and they barely register at all.

In fact, once you’re ensconced in the Continental’s opulent cabin, barely anything registers. A heavy right foot produces some distant V8 thunder, but otherwise, it’s almost eerily quiet.

The surroundings are, unsurprisingly, spectacular: all beautifully soft leather, knurled dials and other lovely materials: our test car had a turned aluminium dash, but you can also get more kinds of wood than we knew existed, or even, through Bentley’s Mulliner personalisation programme, various types of stone. It still has the party-piece rotating central piece in the dash, too, flipping between the infotainment screen and a set of analogue clocks.

The only suggestion that some corners have been cut are some of the slightly plasticky buttons on the steering wheel and in the centre console, but really, straws are being clutched at: the Continental’s interior is glorious.

A PHEV, of course, always brings the risk that you’ll quickly drain the battery and end up with a less powerful car dragging around what effectively becomes ballast, but left to its own devices, the Conti manages things well, keeping things topped up with a healthy level of regen. You can, of course, force it into EV-only mode, where you’ll be able to go up to 87mph and do a quoted 50 miles – the reality, as always, will be a lot less.

Really, though, the hybridification of the Continental is trivial. It’s a spectacularly complete GT car, easily good enough to make us forget that the W12 ever existed. Who knows how many people actually buy grand tourers to go grand touring anymore, but you don’t need to be pounding down a French Autoroute to appreciate what a broadly talented car it is.

Then again, with pricing starting at £236,000, and options like the carbon ceramic brakes quickly pushing it into realms that are easier to describe as a fraction of a million, it’d better be good. But look at it this way: the Continental is still around three quarters the price of the latest V12 hyper-GTs – the Ferrari 12Cilindri and Aston Martin Vanquish – and it’s hard to imagine that it’s only three quarters as good as those cars.