Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Bentley make another estate car....

... yes, they did have a couple of attempts before, but in my humble opinion, they weren't very good - this is the Arnage attempt.

This time around someone has taken a Bentley GT or Flying Spur & chopped it around a bit.

I saw today on the A303 travelling West to East one of these in black, followed about 4 or 5 cars behind by a standard GT also in black. Later I saw the same standard GT go back to the West Country. Given the time between sightings, it was probably going to & from London.

It follows a long line of coachbuilt cars based on premium Grand Tourers or sports cars, converted into Estate cars or SportWagon to put the marketing name to them. They range from Jaguars (an XJS Shooting Brake made by Lynx) to Aston Martin (DB5, DB6, DBS [I nearly don't mention the DBS as it's truely awful], Virage, Lagonda & Vantage with a concept based on Vanquish as well!) and even a couple of Ferrari 456 that were made into estate cars for the Brunei Royal family - they have a history of buying thousands of specialist cars & storing them in massive underground garages, it has been said that Rolls-Royce & Bentley have both had divisions solely dedicated to supply of bespoke cars to royal families of Brunei & Middle Eastern countries. Maserati have also shown a Quattroporte Concept.

Personally I like them, I've seen a Jaguar XJS Shooting Brake and a Ferrari 456 Estate in the flesh & I have to say they looked very good, given the cost of conversion I should hope that they do look good, but they also followed the lines of the original cars & looked like they were meant to be.

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