First Drive Review
In this era of frightful change, when even the word mother winds up as one-half of a vulgar slur heard incessantly in the rhythmic chanting of what passes for music these days, it is comforting to know that a few things continue to resist change with the resolute fervor of, say, Andy Rooney's refusal to trim the screwball squiggly hairs of his 85-year-old eyebrows.
So rest assured that even with its newest owners—those work-driven Germans from Volkswagen—the assembly line in England that bears the grand Bentley Arnage sedans and limos still moves to a different drummer, at a calming rate of exactly six inches a minute. And it won't move at all unless someone orders one.
Indeed, the Arnage, first introduced in 1998, the year VW acquired Bentley, still gets its 6000 spot welds, fired methodically as from a gun one at a time. Its 520 separate panels must be bound carefully together for eternity by several feet of MIG welds and copious quantities of glue, and the wood veneer, as delicate as strips of puff pastry—oak from faraway California, the burled walnut and the blond bird's-eye maple presumably from secret forests known only to the Rockefellers—must be layered with five coats of clear lacquer and then cured no fewer than 72 hours. And here the assault of change encroaches: That task is now performed by one of only two robots in the greatly refurbished plant, and only because humans are imperfect and cannot apply the coating uniformly.
The other robot is close by, carefully shaping the sheetmetal edges of the hoods. If you'd like one of these servants as a conversation piece for your pad, it costs $540,000 and turns out a finished hood every hour and 20 minutes. Speaking of time, it takes somewhere between 390 and 450 hours, depending on which factory tour guide you believe, to produce an Arnage. That's damned near 12 weeks on the outside. The week we were there, a dozen Arnages were built.
What comes out the end of the factory at Crewe—Rolls-Royces were also once painstakingly produced here—is 5700 pounds of stupefying refinement wearing one, possibly two, colors from a choice of more than 40, a four-door sedan that is almost 18 feet long and smells, inside, like a field of wildflowers. It is powered by an immense pushrod V-8 of 412 cubic inches whose architecture dates back to 1955, bolstered by a pair of Garrett T4 turbochargers. In the sportier Arnage T model, this engine makes 450 horsepower and 646 pound-feet of torque. The more sedate R model is detuned to 400 horses. And please do not ask one of the commissioning agents, "How much for one with a manual?"
