Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid review: Spur of the moment
This is one Bentley with the ability to leave others green with envy, while showing off your green credentials
THERE are better Bentleys to buy than the Flying Spur Hybrid. Except none of them is a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (or PHEV, if you’re into the whole brevity thing).
As car companies go, Bentley is pretty ambitious about cleaning up its act. Its factory runs on solar power, and the brand wants its entire supply chain to be carbon neutral by 2030, a full 20 years earlier than Toyota. But as anyone who pays the fuel bills for a Bentley will tell you, so far the products themselves haven’t exactly walked the talk.
The Flying Spur Hybrid addresses that to a degree. Though it’s nearly impossible to tell from the outside, it’s a PHEV, meaning it combines an electric motor with a petrol engine, but has a large enough battery to let you tool about in traffic for a day’s motoring without burning fuel.
If you want specifics, its 18 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion pack delivers roughly 40 kilometres of emissions-free travel. If you have to travel long distances or want to chase a sports car, the Bentley’s twin-turbo V6 wakes up to enter the fray.
Sure enough, if you’re in Sport mode the Flying Spur lives up to its name. The engine and motor work together to unleash 544 horsepower, and the resulting acceleration is just wicked, especially when you consider that the Bentley weighs all of 2.5 tonnes.
There’s an immediacy to the way it picks up speed, too, because the motor part of its drivetrain responds instantly to your prodding.
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For something so big and hefty, the Flying Spur Hybrid feels nice and wieldy, too. It has that lovely quality of shrinking around you as you thread it through corners. Some people who have seven figures to spend on a car still enjoy doing the driving themselves, and it’s not surprising that they tend to buy Bentleys.
The silence and smoothness of electric drive works brilliantly for a plush car like the Flying Spur. In electric mode it rolls around as if powered by the wind, and the only thing you hear is the air-conditioning. The ride seems a little firmer than I remember in the petrol-only Flying Spur V8, but otherwise the car is a peerlessly relaxing way to travel.
The downside is that as PHEVs go, the Flying Spur feels a bit last-generation. The battery is all too easy to deplete, and once that’s done the fuel consumption isn’t exactly going to endear you to Greta Thunberg.
I covered the first 50 km with a mix of electricity and petrol, and the Bentley’s trip computer said it sipped the stuff at a rate of 3.9 litres per 100 km – teetotaling enough to make a Toyota Prius proud. But with the battery empty, another 30 km saw the petrol consumption rise to 7.4 L/100 km, which is brilliant for a big Bentley but rather ordinary otherwise.
And that was after stopping for half an hour of charging, which pushed just 10 km of range into the battery.
Newer PHEVs are capable of going twice as far on battery power, which makes it conceivable that you could drive to work and back every day without using a drop of fuel (assuming you have access to daily charging), and fire up the engine for golf trips across the Causeway.
Perhaps more relevant to the target buyer is that the Flying Spur Hybrid’s V6 engine isn’t particularly cultured. Sometimes it shakes the car when it wakes up to join the motor. When topping up the battery, which it sometimes does to keep a supply of juice on standby for when you engage Sport mode, it buzzes the cabin.
And it generally has a gruff voice, whereas the Flying Spur V8 sounds like a geological phenomenon.
For all that, the Flying Spur Hybrid does have all the presence and grandeur of its illustrious badge, meaning it has the ability to leave others green with envy, whatever its green credentials. More modern hardware would improve the electric range, but while there are better PHEVs out there to buy, none of them are Bentleys.
Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid Engine 2,894 cc, twin-turbo V6 Power 416 hp Torque 550 Nm Electric Motor 136 hp, 400 Nm System Power 544 hp System Torque 750 Nm Gearbox 8-speed automatic Battery Lithium ion, 18 kWh Charge Time / Type 2.5 hours / Wallbox Electric Range 45 km (estimated) 0-100km/h 4.3 seconds Top Speed 285 km/h Fuel Efficiency 3.2L /100 km Agent Wearnes Automotive Price S$1,169,000 without Certificate of Entitlement Available Now
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