Bentley goes back to the stone age

NORMALLY it’d take a couple of days for some robots to bolt your next new car together – but they do things differently at Bentley.

Order the latest version of the Continental GT or Mulsanne and it turns out the production process actually started about 200 million years ago, in a part of the world that’s now at the bottom of an Indian quarry. That’s how long it’s taken for a type of stone to become just about good enough for the luxury car boffins to use as it as a new kind of dashboard veneer.

Yes, you read that correctly. As part of a new service being offered by Mulliner – Bentley’s in-house coachbuilding service – your nearest Premiership footballer can have their new car offered up with what’s effectively a stone dashboard. About time!

I genuinely find it hard to believe that in the era of Grand Designs and iPads that the vast majority of cars come with a choice of two interior finishes – grey plastic, or black plastic. Materials matter, which is why I’m surprised it’s taken the car world so long to realise that stone is a wonderful material to work with (and light too, given Bentley’s is just a tenth of a millimetre thick).

I’d love the idea of a car’s dashboard being trimmed with a dark, brooding slab of stone straight out of the Honister Slate Mine. Having been tempted by the gift shop right outside its front door I’ve seen firsthand how it’s possible to make everything from chopping boards to garden tables out of the stuff. Surely a bit on a car’s dashboard to replace the horrid wood-effect plastic on some of today’s hatchbacks can’t be too far a stretch? Marble would look magnificent too, if the front of most high street banks are anything to go by.

Nor should imaginative interiors stop at stone either. You only have to look at the body coloured flourish streaking across a Fiat Coupe’s dashboard to know the effect exposed metal can have in the right colour. It looks wonderful but very few manufacturers (take a bow, Volkswagen) actually do it.

For now I’ll have to stick to wood-trimmed classic cars to get an exciting interior, but if I go get a sudden windfall I know where I’ll be going. Back to the stone age, courtesy of Bentley!

Most car interiors are still in the dark ages

THAT demented artist of Fast Show Fame, Johnny Nice Painter, would have had a field day with the latest hatchback I’ve driven.

My abiding memory of the Audi A1 a colleague and I had the pleasure of piloting wasn’t that we had the delicious irony of driving an A1 car along the A1 road, or that it suffered from having a particularly dim-witted automatic which forever wanted to change up. No, it was that once you’d clambered inside absolutely everything – dashboard, floors, seats, even the headling along the roof – was black. Black! Black! Black like the dark that envelopes us all!

Comically challenged painters aside, the A1’s unrelenting sea of blackness does raise a question which has longed irked me about today’s cars. Why are almost all of them various shades of black and grey?

Ingolstadt’s smallest offering is by no means the worst offender – I’ve driven countless cars, usually German hatchbacks, which offer the owner an interior which is virtually indestructible but with all the flair and colour of a prison cell in Dresden. It’s as though the VW Group’s chief designers invited Joy Division, Morrissey and LS Lowry to create a car interior which would perfectly encapsulate the steely industrial feel of Manchester on a grey Monday morning, and have – save for a few chrome flourishes in recent years – stuck with it.

Is there some unwritten rule that car interiors have to be crushingly dull, so that drivers are forced to look at the (equally grey) road instead? It’s got to stop. There are a few rare flickers of light in the car cabin world – step forward, Fiat 500 – but it seems ludicrous that you can specify pretty much any interior colour you like at B&Q and fifty shades of grey at BMW.

Surely, in today’s era of Grand Designs and trendy hotel rooms, we deserve to be able to go into a car showroom and pick out whichever pastel shades please us most? For what it’s worth, I reckon it would make us happier drivers, and a happy driver is a safe one.

I know lots of people – including one chap who enjoyed a four hour commute every day - who spend very nearly as much time in the car as they do in the house. Would you decorate your living room to look like the inside of the new Volkswagen Golf?

Nope, neither would I.

How did I ever survive without air conditioning?

HERE’S one to ponder over your post-work pint tonight. Have you an invention so useful you hardly notice when you’re using it, yet to have it malfunction would prompt a crisis of unimaginable proportions?

My vote, obviously, would go for the internet. My first question at any hotel reception I end up on work assignments is what the WiFi code is; my second, when they tell me it’s a tenner a night, is how they think they can away with charging for a service that’s as an essential a part of your stay as having towels in your bathroom and a key for your room. Having access to Facebook and Twitter in one of those 21st century essentials you just can’t do without.

But there’s an in-car invention which – at the moment at least – I’ve been noting by its absence; air con. Even though my job primarily involves working with older cars, a lot of the journeys to shows up and down the country have been at the wheel of cars far newer than my own. Cars which, without exception, were a prod of a plastic button away from a refreshing blast of artificially chilled air.

Even the Chevrolet Captiva, one of the worst cars I’ve driven all year, was saved from complete condemnation because it came with a powerful air con system on a sizzling summer afternoon. When you’re spoilt with the option of an air con button after an afternoon of traipsing around a hot, sticky car show, you simply stick it on, whack it up to full blast and forget about it. Car makers know this and as a result offer it on just about everything; on a truly scorching day, getting air con right can rescue something that's unspeakably rubbish just about everywhere else.

So when I had to do a four hour journey in a car which didn’t have air con – my 17-year-old Rover 214 SEI – it was painful how absent the cool air I’d become accustomed to was. No amount of opening windows or using the power of thought to try and make the dashboard somehow grow its own air con button could help me escape the reality of being sat inside what was effectively a 70mph greenhouse for hours on end. Still, it could be worse – after 25 minutes of stop-starting through one particularly bad traffic jam on the M62, the gentle rise of the temperature gauge indicated the engine was enjoying it even less than I was!

My point is that air con, once you’ve become accustomed to a car equipped with it, is one of those brilliant inventions you can’t really live without.

Ten years older

IT'S a makeover challenge even Gok Wan couldn't master. How do you take an already evocative classic and make it mouthwateringly inviting?

What you see above is the interior of my MGB GT, which despite being in the middle of a restoration and in need of a good hoover and clean is still an appealing place to be, like the carriage of a steam-hauled train on a heritage railway. You just don't get touches like the fonts on the chrome-ringed dials or the Mota-Lita steering wheel on a modern motor, which is part of the reason why I love sitting in it.

But give the interior over to an automotive makeover expert and it'll end looking like the one you see below, which a mechanic mate mentioned after spotting it:



Believe it or not, these are both cabins of the same model, but the owner couldn't have made it more different if he'd tried. Every single panel and patch of trim is interchangeable with the interior of my own, humbler car, but unscrew the MG octagon badge from the steering wheel and you'd swear you were in a Jag or a Bentley. It's an inviting, sumptuous place to be, and all the owner's done is replace the carpets, dash panels and trimmings with something that wouldn't look out of place in a Riva Aquarama.

It actually transforms an already stylish, unapologetically Seventies cabin into something straight out of the Sixties, and I love it. The finished result is as beautiful as a blank cheque, but I wouldn't do it simply because my wallet won't stretch far enough.

Would you?