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Bentley marks 95th anniversary with special Mulsanne

The top end of the new car market seldom seems to need much justification for rolling out a new special edition - other than bringing in a few extra bucks and making its customers feel extra special in the process. Bentley, for its part, is celebrating its 95th anniversary this year, and to mark the occasion has released a special edition of its top-of-the-line Mulsanne saloon.
Called the Mulsanne 95, the limited-edition limo gets three very British color options, dark-tint finish for the Flying B hood ornament and special 21-inch wheels. Step inside and you'll find two-tone blue and white leather with red top-stitching, with a 95 motif embroidered into the seats and special illuminated treadplates, all offset by special Fulbeck Walnut panels that come from a single, giant walnut tree some 300 to 400 years old that came down in a storm in Lincolnshire in 2007.
Buyers will be able to choose between Britania Blue, Empire Red or Oxford White, but only 15 examples will be made available, and all exclusively in Bentley's home UK market.

Gliding on the ice at Bentley's fantasy camp

It was just before 2:00 PM when I landed in Helsinki, bleary-eyed and more than slightly disoriented, after a late-night departure from New York and an early-morning connection in Amsterdam. I was staring at the departures board. There was one more flight to go before I could join Bentley for Power on Ice, its annual ice driving experience in the northerly town of Kuusamo, but there was a problem: There were two HEL-KAO flights on the board, both slated to leave at 4:30, and it was impossible to discern which was Bentley's chartered flight to the alpine ski area. Nonplussed and unable to utter a word in Finnish, I approached a gate agent with rudimentary English to see if she knew which flight was mine. "I'm sorry, sir," she said in an Finnish take on the Omaha dialect, "Your plane does not seem to exist." I winced. Of course it didn't. "My" plane was way out on the tarmac, far away from proletariat jumbo jets, accessible only through a gate that the automaker had staffed and commandeered for the afternoon. It was an auspicious start to three days of attending Bentley's exclusive fantasy camp for its affluent super-fans, which purportedly exists to answer the question: What can you give the Bentley fan who already has everything? For drivers more accustomed to making graceful entries and exits in their posh vehicles, several days of power sliding on a private track more than suffices. You need not be a Bentley owner to participate in the program, but an aficionado of the brand with some cash burning a pretty big hole in the pocket. For the better part of a decade, Bentley has decamped to Kuusamo, the town located just south of the Arctic Circle, to prove the British performance bona-fides of its lineup on 19 square miles of frozen Kuusamojarvi lake, as part of the wintertime Power on Ice event. The program satisfies the need of high-end performance enthusiasts who want something different than arriving at another five-star hotel for another weekend of good eating, drinking, and relaxing. Plenty of brands assert that they have a bespoke answer for discerning customers, but Power on Ice is truly different. You need not be a Bentley owner to participate in the program, but an aficionado of the brand with some cash burning a pretty big hole in the pocket.

Bentley SUV spotted wearing its own suit

It's been over two years since Bentley unveiled its first SUV concept at the 2012 Geneva Motor Show. In the time since, Bentley has sent it back to the drawing board and started development, embodied just a couple of weeks ago as a test mule wearing the bodywork of an Audi Q7, the replacement for which will share its underpinnings with the new Bentley. But what we have here is our best look yet at the forthcoming big Bentley.
Now wearing its own suit (albeit a heavily camouflaged one), this Bentley SUV prototype was recently spotted undergoing testing. And judging from the NewBentley.com stickers plastered along its flanks and rear bumpers, it seems like the crew from Crewe wanted us to see it - or at very least has resigned itself to the fact that we probably would.
The prototype is already wearing the new round headlamps that were part of the redesign, as well as LED taillights, and the interior photos snapped through the windows give us an idea of what to expect from the completed cabin, including the digital instrument cluster and head-up display at the base of the windshield.