I’ve done plenty of very high speeds on Horiba MIRA’s ‘twin horizontal’ straights, but rarely quite like this.
The Bentley Continental GT Speed Hybrid that I recently road tested took me to the far side of 170mph several times, back and forth in opposite directions, all within the bounds of a measured mile, while simultaneously massaging my rather spoiled and considerable posterior.
I didn’t ask it to; I just forgot to turn that particular seat function off. And, well, there can’t be many cars that could have done both.
The irony was that the optional massage seats weren’t in fact switched on. Instead, I was experiencing what Crewe calls ‘postural adjustment’, fitted as standard and designed to relieve the load on your backside over a long journey.
You can read all about this latest Bentley in a six-page test in a few weeks’ time. Suffice to say, for now, that the Continental GT Speed is indeed a worthy purveyor of the brand’s inimitable and characteristically enveloping, cosseting, thunderously fast and pervasively special grand touring experience.
All 2462kg and 772bhp of it, replete as the car is now with a V8-engined plug-in hybrid powertrain that should keep it relevant for years to come.
And being a PHEV capable of electric-only running at one moment and then switching to the piston-powered kind within an instant, the next thing it made me wonder was: which is actually quieter?
Isn’t the answer obvious? Ultimately, yes. But the size of the decisive margin might still surprise you. There is certainly a bit of a myth abroad that any car capable of electric running must be quieter and more refined than any that isn’t and that EVs are all whisper-quiet.
When you break out the noise meter and record what’s actually going on, the truth turns out to be a fair bit more complicated.
All of Autocar’s cabin noise testing is done on the MIRA mile straights – the same surface where our benchmark acceleration numbers are generated. So while the test conditions on the day can vary, we keep the input factors as constant as we can.
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What about sound insulation?, how often have you been out somewhere and the boom boom boom of someone who is playing there tunes a full blast, unless you drive your EV with no distractions like this, that's the only time it'll be Cathedral quite inside, some EV do make a little noise which for some is too quiet,and m what if your partially deaf?, why just not give Ev's a fake engine sou...oh, yeah that would sound rubbish.