The entire automotive industry’s focus this week is on France, where Mondiale L’Automobile – the Paris Motor Show to you and me – begins on Thursday with two Press Preview days.
More of that later in the week, and probably next week too, but I spent yesterday digging into the history of Bentley and in particular the man whose name the company took, founder Walter Owen Bentley.
Based in Crewe but now owned by Volkswagen, Bentley has always had a reputation for building ultra-comfortable cars that would happily cross continents in a single stretch. It’s a fact often-quoted by the company in its marketing material, but I never knew where it came from until yesterday. Apparently, Mr B and his engineers used to take prototype cars to mainland Europe because that gave them access to the type of long, straight and empty roads that simply didn’t exist in the UK at beginning of the last century. Easy enough now – get on the Eurostar – but how much of a faff must that have been back in the day?
Secondly, the revised Bentley Continental GT – being unveiled in Paris and pictured above – has a new audio system in it that’s a first for the car industry. As someone who likes his music, this sort of innovation gets me a bit excited. The system, developed by British firm Naim, creates a virtual ‘sound field’ so that, independent of speaker layout and where you’re sitting in the car, you get concert hall-quality sound reproduction. I hope they've got a demo in Paris!
Breakdown Cover from 
