Bentley Bentayga Review 2023

Considering the tiny number of people who can afford them, there’s a ludicrous amount of choice for buyers of cars like these. It often feels like there are as many rivals for the Bentayga as there are pounds in its pricetag. So, what marks the Bentley out against the rest?

Well, its blend of abilities for one thing. While the Lamborghini Urus is the racy option and the Rolls Royce Cullinan is the wafty option, the Bentayga sits slap bang in between and provides a good mixture of both. Its Bentley badge means it creates the right impression, and it’s practical enough and comfortable enough to be the everyday car that buyers will need it to be. Quality and craftsmanship are Bentley’s other trademarks, and the Bentayga has them in spades. 

Over the years, Bentley’s biggest rival in the luxury marketplace has been Rolls Royce, so although there’s a colossal price difference, the Bentayga will inevitably be compared with the Cullinan. 

The Lamborghini Urus is also likely to be considered by luxury SUV buyers, too, but it should be noted that the three are all very different in character. The Urus is like a supercar on stilts, the Cullinan is like a softly-waftly limousine, while the Bentayga is bang in the middle, trying to provide a blend of sportiness and luxury, rather than nailing its colours to either mast in particular.

Other cars in the mix for your cash will be the Range Rover and Porsche Cayenne, and cars like the Audi Q8, BMW X7 and Mercedes G-Class shouldn’t be discounted, either.

This is the whole reason you buy a Bentley in the first place. Yes, you’ll recognise many of the switches and dials from far cheaper Audi models, but most of the rest of the cabin is made and finished by hand. 

Everywhere you look, there’s soft leather, turned aluminium and polished wood veneers, all of which has been painstakingly prepared by highly skilled masters of their various crafts in a large room in Crewe. And the intricacy and precision with which it's all stitched, screwed or slotted together shows just as much attention-to-detail.

The feeling of quality this brings cannot be overstated. Yes, and Audi is nice to sit in, but this is another level entirely. If you’re being super-critical, a Rolls Royce Cullinan feels even posher, but in fairness, the price difference between the two cars is colossal.

The Bentagya’s 8.0-inch colour touchscreen looks a little bit small set into the chunky dashboard of such a huge car, and because it’s an older system than the one found in newer Bentleys like the Continental GT and Flying Spur, it looks a bit dated as well. The graphics are rather old-hat, and the responses and screen transitions can also be a little slow at times. 

That said, the menus are reasonably logical in their arrangement, so it’s a pretty easy system to find your way around. The shortcut buttons running down the sides of the screen come in handy, too. It’d be better if there was a rotary dial or some other controller to act as an alternative to the touchscreen functionality, though, because it’d be less distracting to use on the move.

The system supports most of the functionality you’d expect to find, including sat-nav, Bluetooth, DAB radio, a (60GB) hard drive and a wifi hotspot. There’s Apple Carplay, too, but Android Auto isn’t supported.

Even the standard stereo gives great sound quality, but among the myriad optional extras are various upgrades that bring more and more in the way of speakers and wattage.

You’d expect any luxury SUV to offer plenty of space, and the Bentayga delivers. The front seats have bags of room and there’s enough headroom and legroom in the back for lanky adults to get comfy, too. Granted, a Range Rover provides a smidge more, but you’ll hardly be feeling like you’re cooped up.

Early on in the car’s life, five seats came as standard, and in these versions, there’s enough shoulder space for three people across the rear bench. 

Whoever’s in the middle will have to straddle the large hump in the floor made by the transmission tunnel, though. The seats are split 40-20-40, allowing you to fold them down in various configurations to give more versatility when carrying bigger loads. With all the seats in place, the boot is large, if not as gargantuan as in many rivals. That said, you probably won’t be doing many dump runs in your Bentayga.

You might also find Bentaygas with four seats instead of five. This was an option (which Bentley says most buyers did specify) on early cars, and standard in later ones. The two individual seats can recline electrically and massage you at the same time, making life very luxurious, but they do rob you of the ability to fold the seats down. At the same time these were made standard, Bentley also started to offer the Bentayga with seven seats. 

We’ve not encountered one of these versions yet, but with the limited amount of space available, we’d expect the two extra pews to be on the snug side.

Whichever version of the Bentayga you choose, you’ll be getting a very fast car. The only question is how fast. The fastest version, the Speed, uses the flagship twin-turbocharged 6.0-litre W12 petrol engine that the firm is famous for, tuned up to give 635 horsepower. 

We haven’t tried the Speed yet, but we have tried the engine in its standard form, which still delivers a very healthy 608PS. It’ll sprint from 0-62mph in just 4.0 seconds, but while that’s an impressive figure for a car weighing two-and-a-half tonnes, what’s more impressive is the smooth, muscular, effortless way it achieves that acceleration. You put your foot down, the engine growls, the world immediately starts moving past your windows much more quickly, and then you ease off and there’s peace once more.

That said, it’s a similar story regardless of which of the various engines you pick. The 550PS V8 petrol engine is half a second slower on the standard sprint, but it’s very similar in character and still feels brutishly quick. 

For a very brief time, Bentley also did a version with a V8 diesel engine (it was discontinued fairly soon after launch once diesel became a dirty word), and if you can find one, it might just be the version to have. With 435PS, it’s only marginally slower than the petrols, yet it can go far longer between fill-ups, useful when you’ve got a continent to munch through in a hurry. A plug-in hybrid version is also offered, that combines a 3.0-litre V6 petrol engine with an electric motor to deliver 449PS, but we haven’t had the chance to try it yet.

All Bentagygas drive all four wheels through an eight-speed automatic gearbox, and in all of the versions we’ve tried, it’s fabulous. It shuffles up and down the gears smoothly when you’re pootling along, quickly when you’re getting a move-on, and when you nail the throttle, it kicks down instantly and always finds the right ratio first time.

This is one of the areas in which you’d expect any Bentley to excel, and the Bentayga doesn’t disappoint. All the engines we’ve tried are super-smooth and quiet. 

At tickover, you barely know whether the car is turned on, and on the move, you hear barely a murmur as you whisk along. Until, that is, you nail the throttle pedal, whereupon you're treated to a fabulous mechanical snarl that gets your juices flowing as quickly as your car. And, if you ever had the misfortune to feel any unwanted vibration is your Bentayga, then there would most likely be a powertrain engineer somewhere in Crewe falling on his sword with the dishonour of it all.

Things are just as impressive on wind- and road noise, too, despite the car’s blunt shape and fat tyres, so whether you’re plodding along the King’s Road or blatting down an Autobahn, the Bentayga’s cabin stays impressively serene.

The Bentayga hasn’t been crash tested by Euro NCAP yet, and it’s sold in such low numbers that it probably never will be. Mechanically, however, it’s related very closely to the Audi Q7, and that’s a car that’s scored the full five-star rating. In terms of the safety gear you get as standard, the Bentayga does an adequate job, but it doesn’t go the extra mile as you might expect in a car costing this much. 

There are six airbags and an autonomous emergency braking system, but most other clever safety features - such as radar-guided cruise control, lane keep assist, head-up display, traffic sign recognition, pedestrian detection and self-parking functions - are bundled up into option packages that cost the original buyer extra.

The official figures suggest that a full charge of the battery will allow the plug-in hybrid version to go around 25 miles on electric power alone. We wouldn’t bank on getting any more than 20 miles in the real world, and considerably less in cold weather. A full charge will take around two and a half hours from a 7kW wallbox home charger, or about three times longer if you try doing it from a domestic three-pin plug. 

It’s a Bentley. It costs six figures new. It’s got ludicrous performance. So obviously, it’s going to sit in group 50 for insurance, the highest, most expensive one there is. Then again, if you’re worried about the size of an annual insurance premium, you’re unlikely to be considering a car as fantastically expensive as the Bentayga.

If your Bentayga was registered after April 1st 2017, then you’ll pay the maximum VED bill available under the current tax system. That’s £475 per year between years two and six of the car’s life, and then £150 every year after that. That’s on all except the hybrid, which qualifies for a £10 discount. Break out the Champagne, Jeeves. 

All Bentaygas registered before that date will be taxed under the old CO2-related system. Cars of this vantage will be either W12s, which will cost you £580 per year, or diesels, which will cost £330. Having said all that, though, if you can afford to buy a Bentayga, the cost of a now-metaphorical tax disc is unlikely to put you off.

Trim levels aren’t really a thing where Bentleys are concerned. The various different versions are separated by their level of power and method of propulsion, rather than the kit they come with, which is fairly standard across the board. That said, there’s no such thing as a ‘standard’ Bentley. 

The level of equipment that comes included - which includes LED headlights, automatic wipers, cruise control, a panoramic roof, climate control, heated leather seats and all the various infotainment and safety gear mentioned earlier - is merely a starting point for how new car buyers spec their cars using the vast array of weird and wonderful options available, many of which will set them back five figures. 

For used buyers, it means that you'll probably never find two cars the same, and whether or not the car you find has the bits you want on it will probably be something of a lucky dip.