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"  On-Sale Date: Now  Price: $200,500 to $211,430 Competitors: Rolls Royce Ghost, Maserati Quattroporte, Aston Martin Rapide, Jaguar XJ, Mercedes-Benz S-Class.  Powertrains: twin-turbocharged 6.0-liter W-12, 616 hp, 590 lb-ft; eight-speed automatic, AWD EPA Fuel Economy (city/hwy): 12/20  What&amp;#039;s New: The four-door luxury sedan formerly known as the Bentley Continental Flying Spur will now officially be known as just the Bentley Flying Spur. We&amp;#039;ll give you a second to let that sink in. Got it? Good. So why drop the Continental designation? Sedan sales are up in all markets, and Bentley wants shoppers to perceive the Spur as a separate model rather than just a four-door version of the Continental GT. To further impress this idea, the Flying Spur also receives structural and styling changes to set it apart from the GT. The new Flying Spur appears lower, wider, and more kinetic, and newly sculpted sides give the impression that the car has switched its wardrobe from Brooks Brothers to Tom Ford. The outer front headlights are now larger than the inner lamps, and in the rear the oval taillights of the Continental GT are hidden in a rectangular housing that wraps from the trunk around to the rear fenders.  The interior also gets an overhaul. Featuring few carryover parts from the previous-gen sedan, the immaculate cabin is so luxurious you feel like you&amp;#039;ve been smacked in the face by a white-gloved hand holding a stack of crisp one-hundreds. Woodgrains that are painstakingly matched, gleaming chrome air-vent knobs, and oh-so-supple leather lined with precision hand-stitching leave little doubt that you&amp;#039;ve just slid into a Bentley. An available high-tech entertainment package for the rear makes passengers feel as if they&amp;#039;re lounging in a home theatre, and a new rear console touchscreen remote gives them control over most of the car&amp;#039;s electronics.  In terms of engineering upgrades, Bentley has updated everything from the steering to the damping for improved comfort and performance. The springs, antiroll bars, and bushes are softer, and a new automatic suspension system adjusts ride height according to passenger load and speed. New lightweight materials in the reengineered body shell reduce the overall weight by 110 pounds compared to the outgoing model. Beneath the hood, Bentley&amp;#039;s upgraded W12 engine (also in the Continental GT) gives the Flying Spur a 12 percent power upgrade over the old Spur, making it the most powerful four-door Bentley ever. Overall fuel efficiency improves by 13 percent.  Tech Tidbit: The United States is Bentley&amp;#039;s largest market, but China is a close second. And according to Bentley, almost all its Flying Spur and Mulsanne buyers in China use chauffeurs. Sounds like a waste of 616 hp to us, but because of this, buyers can make the rear of their Flying Spur a full-on entertainment and command center. Each headrest can be outfitted with a 10-inch TV screen with inputs from a DVD player, SD slot, USB and HDMI ports, and an onboard 64 GB hard drive. There&amp;#039;s also an optional Wi-Fi hotspot that can connect up to eight devices to the cloud. Even if you pass on the $7300 multimedia and connectivity package, the Flying Spur&amp;#039;s rear center console features a new removable touchscreen remote that gives the chauffeured full control of the front infotainment system and the HVAC. The rear passenger can even monitor speed and fuel usage. A similarly capable smartphone app is also available. And just in case you tire of the peasants stealing glances while you conduct your business, rear and side window shades are now standard.  Driving Character: With China becoming so important to Bentley&amp;#039;s bottom line, the carmaker chose the country for the global launch of the Flying Spur. And driving in China isn&amp;#039;t anything like driving in the U.S. or most of Europe. Put simply, anything goes. Before our test drive, Bentley even provided some rules of the road for driving in China. One of the rules: &amp;quot;Simply looking right and left is not enough\u2014expect the unexpected.&amp;quot; Driving through mountains just north of Beijing, our Spur glided along secondary roads effortlessly, gracefully absorbing imperfections in the pavement. New engine mounts and underbody paneling keeps road noise to a minimum, which we appreciated as &amp;quot;Flight of the Valkyries&amp;quot; blasted from the excellent eight-speaker Naim sound system ($7480). Locals drying corn in the middle of the road and heavy steel trash cans intermittently placed in our lane warranted enough caution to keep us well below the Flying Spur&amp;#039;s top speed of 200 mph, but the engine&amp;#039;s twin turbos summoned whatever power we needed in a hurry. The Flying Spur&amp;#039;s ability to instantly transform from docile cruiser to almighty brute at the driver&amp;#039;s behest is endlessly entertaining.  Despite weighing in at 5445 pounds, the Spur is surprisingly agile and remains steady when tossed hard into a turn. The body rolls only slightly and the tires hold firm despite issuing chirps of duress as a result of the car&amp;#039;s wayward mass. Sharing the road with pokey three-wheeled tuk-tuks, trucks overloaded with all sorts of building materials, and locals on bicycles meant we didn&amp;#039;t get to exploit much of the Spur&amp;#039;s sport mode, which adjusts throttle and shift mapping for a more aggressive driving experience. However, we did enjoy putting the car into manual shift mode and working the ZF eight-speed automatic transmission whenever we found some open road and weren&amp;#039;t too distracted by the Great Wall ruins in the distance. Although not bad, the Spur&amp;#039;s slower steering required a little more steering input than we&amp;#039;d prefer when going around a bend, but that&amp;#039;s really our biggest driving complaint.  Favorite Detail: One challenge in car production is making sure all of the parts snugly fit together during assembly. For example, wide gaps around hood and doors look sloppy and suggest an inattention to detail. Same goes for the interior, where the gap between the trimming on the door and the dash can range from nonexistent to several fingers wide. In the Flying Spur, not only does the door perfectly match up with the dash, but so do the wood panels on each and, most impressively, the two rows of hand stitching on both leather surfaces. It&amp;#039;s this level of fastidiousness that makes a Bentley feel that much fancier than the standard German luxury sedans.  Driver&amp;#039;s Grievance: We have three, actually. The first is petty, but hey, this is a $200,000 car. If you&amp;#039;re dropping that much dough, you get to be a little petty. The nickel-finish trim at the base of the shifter looks out of place among so many other premium surfaces and materials. If it weren&amp;#039;t for our test car&amp;#039;s Mulliner-edition knurled, leather-bound shifter knob sporting a bold letter B, we might mistake the base for that of a sub-$75,000 vehicle or even\u2014gasp!\u2014a Volkswagen.  Secondly, for all the effort Bentley puts into the rear seat entertainment and amenities, it&amp;#039;d be nice to see some of this attention up front. With other luxury carmakers offering convenient selector knobs and even touchpads in the center console to control the touchscreen, the Flying Spur could benefit from a similar setup.  Lastly, Bentley&amp;#039;s manual shifting stalks attached to the steering column are awkward. If you want to shift coming out of a turn, the fact that they are stationary means they aren&amp;#039;t always within reach. Paddle shifters mounted on the steering wheel would be preferable.  Bottom Line: The Flying Spur is an impressive vehicle. It also costs as much as a house. But the type of person that buys this car already has at least two homes, so dollars don&amp;#039;t matter. When you buy a Bentley, you&amp;#039;re buying excess in every aspect: power, materials, engineering, technology, and comfort. Judged by this yardstick, the new Flying Spur measures up quite well. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/reviews/a8983/2014-bentley-flying-spur-test-drive-15510933/>