Bentley Makes a Light Show for the Car Whose Sound System Alone Is Worth a Muscle Car

The impressive grand tourer stood at 5.8 meters (19 feet) in length and 2.4 meters (almost eight feet) in width, but neither that nor its imposing design language is what captivated the most. That task fell on a wealth of pretentious materials (even some that were unheard of in the industry, like 5,000-year-old Riverwood), but also on a series of features that were equally pristine for the automotive world.

That latter category included the car displaying an impressive light show on its front grille, something that at the time was quite rare and allowed Bentley to introduce light as a material it plans to use extensively in its future cars, with the same results it does metal, wood, and leather.

The technology that was previewed on the EXP 100 GT five years ago has finally received its first real-life application, and it does so in a car whose sound system alone has the price of an entry-level American muscle car: the Batur.

Bentley's Batur, in essence a Continental that was taken one step further in terms of luxury by the guys over at the company's Mulliner division, is one of the most exclusive cars of our time, with just 18 of them being planned for production.

Mechanically speaking the Batur is not fundamentally different from a Continental as we've got the mighty W12 engine under the hood (a powerplant that gets its final use in this model, because Bentley will pull the plug on it in April), rated at 740 hp and 1,000 Nm of torque.

The sound system I mentioned earlier is made by Naim, and it comprises 20 speakers (six tweeters, nine mid-range speakers, two woofers, two active bass transducers, and one sub-woofer). The price for all of that alone is $30,000, which is a lot for many of us, but not for someone willing to pay $2.1 million for a car.

Bentley does not say if it charges anything extra for its special light show. But it does describe something the Batur will always be remembered for as the one that did it first: use Advanced Digital Light Processing (DLP) to display welcome messages.

DLP is something high-end headlights already use, but also head-up displays. To date, however, nobody has thought of using the technology this way. Bentley did, and we find their idea exciting enough to give it a closer look.

The light sculpture, as the carmaker calls the idea, relies on three color light sources, a series of lenses, and two prisms. Working with them is something called the Digital Micromirror Device (DMDTM), which is no bigger than eight millimeters. In fact, the entire hardware for this light show is just a tad bigger than a couple of AA batteries.

Modifications made to DLP allow the Batur to create an animated welcome image as soon as the door is opened. It shows up as light cut through a crystal is the design and the profile of the car itself, projected on the ground.

The process behind all this is rather simple, really. Light from the sources passes through the lenses and prisms, then it is refocused through another five lenses and transforms into the desired image.

The animation part of the entire affair is owed to a small silicone chip that holds no less than 415,800 tiny mirrors. And by tiny I mean exactly that, as each one is a fifth of the width of a human hair, or just 16 microns. Each of these mirrors is used to reflect light and react to it thousands of times per second.

Each pixel that is visible in the image is the result of the work of a single mirror. Not all mirrors are activated at a given time, with the light hitting the ones not needed for a certain phase of the animation being sent light back to a heat sink inside the projector.

Because this is a bespoke car talking, Bentley will not ship the cars solely with its idea of a projected image, but it will also allow customers to take part in the creation of the animations and can even match them to the colors of the car people have made.

You can get a sense of what all of the above means visually by going through the gallery attached to this piece. To be honest, the entire experience seems a lot less impressive than it sounds, and it kind of comes across as underwhelming. In fact, chances are one you could blink and miss this entire (presumably) very expensive light show.