The Bentley Batur: a very lovely sort of madness

“Thrupp & Maberly,” said Wendy, my mother-in-law, with the air of one laying down a perfect bridge hand at the vicarage drive.  

“James Young,” I feebly countered, knowing she’d won this little game. You require a good memory to recall more than a handful of British coachbuilders. With histories stretching back beyond the motor car to the great coaching days of travel, there are very few of them left, but Mulliner is one. 

Originally formed as H. J. Mulliner in 1897, the firm traded out of Chiswick, and later from Brook Street, London. An early customer was C.S. Rolls, and in 1909 a controlling interest was purchased by John Croall & Sons. By the 1930s, the firm’s work consisted largely of building bodies for Rolls-Royce and Bentley motor cars. So much so that in 1959, Rolls-Royce bought a controlling interest in what was the last independent coachbuilder in Britain and merged the firm with Park Ward – another coachbuilder it owned. 

But special-bodied cars were a dying breed. Cars had moved from a separate chassis base to monocoque structures, which didn’t lend themselves to bespoke bodies. Many coachbuilders moved into specialist commercial vehicle bodies, others were bought by big dealer groups and merged into body repair shops. 

Mulliner lumbered on, relaunched a few times, but was basically relegated to not much more than a paint and trim shop. Since Volkswagen took over the Bentley marque in the early part of this century, it has steadily built up Mulliner’s reputation for bespoke services, culminating in a series of special models such as the Bacalar – a series of barchetta-bodied models, of which only 12 were made – and more recently the Batur, an 18-off series of highly tuned W12 coupé models. 

Before getting to drive the latter, we spent some time with Phillip Dean, design manager of Mulliner, playing fantasy car designers on his computer. There are three levels of Mulliner service: Curated, which is the choice of options available to all customers; Bespoke, which is a small series of limited cars such as Bacalar and Batur; and Coachbuilt, which encompasses models such as the £2-million-plus 1930s Blower continuation and forthcoming Speed Six continuation, which we were allowed to sit in and will be the subject of a forthcoming test.

What Dean was doing for us, however, was guiding us through a selection process based on existing or special paint and trim colours. 

“With something like 49 billion different choices,” he says, “it can seem like the tyranny of choice.”

Average customers spend around £45,000 on this fairly addictive process, though as Dean points out, “the cost of a bespoke pearlescent paint job works out at £17,000 so you don’t need to do much to get there”.

He and his team don’t work on commission, and don’t see themselves as sales staff, so there shouldn’t be pressure to buy. Nevertheless, in one Los Angeles dealership, over 30 per cent of all Bentley sales have some Mulliner content in them. In the last 12 months, Mulliner undertook 500 personal commissions; next year it is expected to complete 750.

What a jape it is to sit beside a talented designer and let your imagination run riot. You can see why the wealthy get so addicted but, to be honest, some of the cars that result are the sort of thing that Jeeves – the famous manservant to Bertie Wooster from PG Wodehouse’s comic novels – would have put out with the dustbins.

Some of Mulliner’s past creations are brighter than the sun and about as hard to look at. Taste is in the eye of the beholder, but we tried to avoid all that and opted for a study in blue, though it was Dean’s experience and talent that steered us away from a gloomy, midnight-blue mood worthy of trumpet player Chet Baker and into the altogether more joyous ultramarine-blue gardens of painter Jacques Majorelle.

Even so, the contrasting exuberance of the metallic purple of the Batur came like a poke in the eye. The interior shows a more conservative hand with (relatively) discreetly piped leather seats and carpets. On top of the £1.65-million-plus-taxes price tag, most Batur owners (they’re all sold) splurge another £100,000 at Mulliner on personalisation. And why wouldn’t they? Bear in mind here, though, that the standard Continental GT Speed on which this car is based costs a mere £230,500. 

What you get for your money is mainly the curvaceous carbon-fibre panels that, while subtle in shape if not colour, also point to the future for the Continental GT, save about 40kg from the standard car’s weight (though it still weighs about 2.2 tonnes), and are mounted in such a way as to stiffen up the bodyshell. 

There’s a tune-up, of course, taking the 6.0-litre twin turbo W12 engine up from the standard car’s 650bhp/664lb ft to 740bhp/738lb ft. The three-chamber air suspension is recalibrated, but the eight-speed, dual-clutch automatic transmission remains the same and so does the four-wheel drive. 

The W12 engine is effectively out of production, so for some that will be the carrot that draws them into this spectacular purple indulgence. The engine and chassis work makes this a more subtle brick-in-a-silk-sock than the standard W12 models, with nicely worked if crushing power delivery on the wet roads around the company’s base at Crewe. You need to have a care, and on the slimy road surfaces it was perfectly possible to light up all four wheels, but this was controllable and more fun than frightening. 

Certainly, this is the best example of a Continental GT with a W12 engine, but the unit’s massive weight always dominates the driving experience. The nose needs to be curated into a corner as it generally prefers to go straight on. Moreover, Bentley already produces a solution to that problem, which takes the form of the Continental GT with a tuned Audi bi-turbo V8. Which makes the sense of this car hover somewhat on the barmy side of the register. 

Still, there’s no accounting for the wisdom of the wealthy. And even if this is a very purple-hued white elephant, I’m sort of glad it exists – even if few of us will ever see one at large.