Watch Bentley's Weird New Anti-Body Roll System At Work

The problem with building cars to be heavy and luxurious is that any pretence of handling prowess gets squashed like Trevor the Accord beneath a borrowed tank.

Bentley has been working on that, though, with a new anti-roll system planned for the all-new 2018 Continental GT, and this video shows it in action at (where else?) the Nurburgring. The purple-blue semi-camouflaged GT in the footage can be seen tyre-squealing its way around the circuit with little or no body roll. It looks… weird, bringing back memories of the old Bose system that was tested on a Lexus LS400 back in the 1990s. The way the car moves doesn’t tally with what your brain is telling you should be happening.

This apparently physics-defying technology is, in fact, just good old brute force and engineering. The system, called Dynamic Ride, uses electric motors to push the anti-roll bars down onto the outside wheels, preventing over two tonnes of Bentley from trying to scrape its door handles on the track surface. The new car will be ‘a lot’ lighter, which makes the system’s job easier, but the diet won’t shave more than 350kg or so at most – and probably less.

Agility will take a big step up, Bentley says, while elsewhere the new car will take a lot of inspiration from the successful Bentayga SUV. It’s expected that most of the Continental GT’s interior technology will come directly from the Bentayga. There will be V8 and V12 engines with around 530bhp and 600bhp respectively.

Via: Autocar