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New Bentley Continental Coming in 2017 With Porsche-Derived Platform

Bentley is a company steeped in tradition with a loyal following of customers, who admittedly are made up of football players and rappers these days. While the GT and GTC are great tourers for wafting around in, the young money buyers aren't too keen on the extra weight they carry around.
Bentley Continental GT V8 7 photos
Photo: Catalin Garmacea
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An all-new Continental model is planned for 2017 and could stand to fix the weight problem. Right after they finish working on their rugged-looking SUV, Bentley's boffins will start working with Porsche on implementing their sophisticated MSB platform.

British magazine Autocar reports that the next Continental will thus share its platform with the new Panamera, coming in 2016. The same platform could also be used by the next Flying Spur, which can wait a little longer for a replacement because it just received a major update.

Talk of platforms is usually quite boring and Bentley using architecture from its sister brands was always going to be a foregone conclusion. What's really interesting about this latest report is that the Conti' is said to drop the current Audi front transaxle case with something called a ‘quill’ shaft. In laymen's terms, that means it will be less like an SUV and more like the all-wheel drive sportscar it was supposed to. Much better weight distribution is another huge benefit.

Autocar also talks about Bentley using the new turbo V8 engine which Porsche is working on for the Panamera 2. Now, the GT, GTC and Flying Spur are already available with different versions of Audi's 4-liter twin-turbo'd 4-liter V8. But this new Porsche-designed mill is said to be better because it makes fewer compromises and is not designed for any sort of volume car, since regular Porsche models don't come with a V8 any more.

Our say: You can never have too many vee eights! And give it a quad turbo system while you're at it…
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About the author: Mihnea Radu
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Mihnea's favorite cars have already been built, the so-called modern classics from the '80s and '90s. He also loves local car culture from all over the world, so don't be surprised to see him getting excited about weird Japanese imports, low-rider VWs out of Germany, replicas from Russia or LS swaps down in Florida.
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