Bentley Will Upgrade Your Old Car’s Infotainment. It Only Costs You Almost Every Button
The Drive ·
Would you trade climate control buttons for a bigger, faster screen with CarPlay in your old car? That's the choice Bentley is giving owners. The post Bentley Will Upgrade Your Old Car’s Infotainment. It Only Costs You Almost Every Button appeared first on The Drive .
These days, car owners broadly are hoping to see a touch fewer screens in their vehicles, and more traditional buttons. This isn’t anecdotal; many automakers have admitted to as much . But if you are one of the fortunate few to own a Bentley from about 10 years ago, you now have a unique opportunity: the choice to add a much larger, greatly improved touchscreen to your vehicle. All it’ll cost you is nearly every climate button and knob.
This week, Bentley announced a comprehensive infotainment upgrade for second-generation Continental GT and Flying Spur models, for an undisclosed price. These cars already had touchscreens from the factory, but they were the more antiquated kind, with poor precision, laggy behavior, and generally limited capabilities. These vehicles wouldn’t have had Apple CarPlay; Bentley didn’t add that in until the third-gen Continental and Spur in 2019. That’s a feature owners might like now.
The old screen was also small by modern standards, partly because an entire slate of buttons, dials, and a dedicated climate-control readout took up space below it. Those are things owners might also prefer but, if they opt for the new infotainment system, the bulk of them get ripped out, too. Even the CD player goes bye-bye.
Bentley says this new, 9.7-inch touchscreen boasts “impressively fast processor speeds” as well as “the latest navigation mapping.” It has a 2K (1440p) resolution and, naturally, supports wired and wireless phone projection. It’s got everything you’d want from a technological standpoint. But it also absorbs most climate functions, and that’s what puzzles me.
In fairness, some physical inputs have been spared. The toggles for A/C, window and mirror defrosting, the navigation shortcut, and what appears to be a voice-control trigger all remain. The seat heating and ventilation controls do too, because they lived south of the shifter to begin with. There are exactly two knobs, seemingly the same as before—one for volume, and one for radio tuning.
Everything else, though, now resides in the screen. Temperature, fan speed, and which vents the air’s funneling through are all software items now. And that’s a questionable call.
I reckon Bentley might’ve done well to make the center display a touch larger in its existing space, and naturally load it with all the latest hardware and features. The climate controls might’ve been a step too far—personally speaking. Of course, I’m not a Bentley owner, so I wonder whether the brand’s clientele would be more receptive.
But I also wanted to put the question to you: Would you rip out the bulk of buttons on your car’s dashboard if it meant better phone connectivity, navigation, screen quality, responsiveness, or anything Bentley’s touting here? Is that a tradeoff you’d be willing to make? Let’s put that comment section to good use, shall we?
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The post Bentley Will Upgrade Your Old Car’s Infotainment. It Only Costs You Almost Every Button appeared first on The Drive .