Here’s a fun thing you can do – if by “fun” you mean “shamelessly obscene, totally silly and sort of karmically destructive.”
Why not treat yourself to a long, luxurious visit to the Bentley Bentayga luxury SUV online configurator? Hey, you could do a lot worse.
All things being equal – and of course, they most certainly are not – it’s a damn fine place to waste half a day imagining what it might be like to be so numbly wealthy, to give so few f-cks for the sufferings of the plebeian world, that you have no problem whatsoever clicking “place order” after you’ve carefully designed your laughably excessive, bespoke, screw-the-world, all-your-kids-detest-you $330,000 “Fly Fishing Edition” ultra-lux SUV no one anywhere actually needs because, well, since when do sheiks go fly fishing in Qatar? Does it even matter?
Bentley, of course, doesn’t give a damn what you think. Why should they? The fabulously snooty, storied British automaker makes some of the world’s most beautiful, overcooked, preposterously expensive, leather-soaked 12-cylinder land yachts, most custom-built for sheiks and tycoons, rappers and royalty and all kinds of vastly unhip billionaire sloths who conflate class and good taste with refrigerated $3,000 leather holsters for their champagne. And they’re selling more cars than ever.
It’s also, of course, a brand you don’t seen much in the U.S., save for a handful of Flying Spurs tooling around the Hamptons and a few Continental GTs in LA, Miami or in the private parking lots of Google HQ – but which, along with the far sexier Aston Martin, you can rather easily find scurrying around the toniest backstreets of London, Morocco, the UAE and, well, who really cares where else.
Bentley’s famously sumptuous interiors: Choose from literally dozens of hides, colors, woods, metals, gemstones, human bone, the flesh of small infants, tiny birds, exotic tiger pelts, the skins of endangered dolphins, the teeth of virgin schoolboys and/or the finest pubic hair of nubile French belly dancers raised solely on a diet of perfectly round grapes and Indonesian breast milk and cocaine.
But that might soon change. See, the Bentayga is the first full-sized SUV designed by a super-premium luxury brand (Lamborghini is, apparently, next, followed by Rolls Royce), and, given how SUVs are, of course, a distinctly American (read: bloated, heavy, shamelessly inefficient) mutation, you can sort of understand why the very first hero shot you see on the Bentayga’s splash page was taken – hey would you look at that? – right atop Pacific Heights.
Target market, anyone? You listening, Zuck?
Do you see them? In that photo up there? The perfectly pristine, violently over-pampered family of wealthy white folks whipping around the corner from their Pac Heights summer house and headed, presumably, for the husband’s meeting with the key investors in his new cryogenics startup? Can you feel the icy emotional chill between the neglected siblings? The biting resentment of the parents? The warm joy provided by the liquid Xanax misting from the custom $20,000 “mood-lifting” Bentley air-purifying system? I bet you can.
One thing to be freely admitted: As someone who’s spent an inordinate amount of time playing with nearly all the top automakers’ online configurators, from Porsche to Aston, Audi to Ferrari, and finding many of them clunky and uninspired (and even downright boring), Bentley’s version, as far as absurd distractions go, is nothing sort of fantastic.
It’s fast, its beautifully designed, everything from its pitch-perfect languaging to its sumptuous layout has been thought through to the Nth – as you might expect when you’re about to drop $210K for the base Bentayga (upwards of $300K, nicely loaded, not including the $600 ashtrays).
Also, this must-see: Notice that main photo of the GG Bridge on Bentley USA’s home page? It’s a whopping 53 billion pixels. Bentley calls it “The world’s most extraordinary car photo.” Scroll in as close as you can to see why.
Fun fact: Did you know Bentley only uses leather from cows raised in cooler European climates? Because that way, the cows suffer from fewer insect bites, which means fewer flaws in the leather? True. To give you an idea of just how thoughtful. (Thanks, Wired).
But it’s also a curious thing, given how the brand only sells about 11,000 cars a year, total, across the entire planet, with a mere 3,000 of them in the US (which is a tad more than Ferrari’s 2,300, but a far cry from sister-brand Porsche, which moves about 50,000 vehicles a year in the states, but which remains a tad shy of the 250,000 units Ford sells of just the Explorer, every single year, all by itself). Then again, according to Bentley’s site, the US remains the brand’s largest single market, with China close behind. The U.K. isn’t even a factor. Clearly there are far more B’s out there than meets the eye.
Which also means that Bentley knows where its caviar is crackered. After all, this is the land of billionaire tech drones in tedious gray T-shirts and terrible haircuts, guys dripping with cash but with little idea what to do with it (and even less skill at handling a 911), but who like to think of themselves as passably manly and only slightly less pale than your average British prince.
No wonder Bentley has come up with a perfect message for them, and their “extra” 300 grand: Why not come fly fishing, you bewildered, glorious dorks?
Read more here:: The $300,000 SUV: Bentley’s gorgeous obscenity
