Cars, stars and the cringe factor

Once, there were few cars as glamorous as a Bentley. Now footballers and topless models are buying them, writes MICHAEL BOOTH.


LONDON - These days it seems as if the image of a car is dictated as much by the celebs who are seen driving it as by the multi-million dollar advertising campaigns that accompany each new launch.

That is why carmakers go to such extraordinary, and frankly embarrassing, lengths to get their cars photographed with every Tom, Dick and premier-league footballer.

Although the car companies' press officers will slip into automatic pompous-denial mode whenever you ask them about it, the evidence to the contrary is plentiful.

Not a week goes by without some preposterously vacuous press release coming through my letter box alerting me to the fact that an Atomic Kitten has just bought a Rover, or Jay Kay has done his bit to combat global warming by buying a dirty great Audi, replete with photo of the celeb receiving the keys to his or her heavily discounted (or free - well, it is cheaper than an ad spot during Coronation Street) motor.

And though you would never guess it from the depths of the celebrity barrel car companies are prepared to scrape (ladies and gentlemen, I give you Sada Walkington "from TV's Big Brother" and her new Mitsubishi), I can't help but feel that there must be some celebrity associations that can actually have a negative affect on brand image.

This thought is prompted by the recent appearance in The Sun of Jordan, at the wheel of her newly acquired Bentley Azure.

According to the tabloid, the renowned topless model paid for the car with her appearance money from an impending TV show. It cost $330,000 second hand.

The paper's investigation continued: "As curvy Jordan took it for a spin, fans had to admire the fine bodywork - and an impressive set of bumpers." "I would love to comment, but we don't comment on any of our customers," said the Bentley press officer when I rang to hear what they thought of this choice piece of publicity.

It is hard to imagine any product actually benefiting from an association with Jordan - the morning-after pill, perhaps - but the folks at Volkswagen who are charged with nurturing Bentley's new image must have been particularly crestfallen to see her tottering around Brighton in her convertible behemoth (that's assuming that Bentley's brand managers aren't German, in which case they probably just assumed she was Benny Hill's chauffeur).

The whole affair appears in an even more tragic light when you consider that, until very recently, there were few cars that were cooler than a Bentley.

These hand-built, old-fashioned gentlemen's carriages tended to appeal to two highly diverse demographic groups. On one side of the Atlantic you had rap stars such as P Diddy, Wyclef Jean, Missy Elliott and Nelly, for whom a posh English car was another way of drawing attention to their limitless wealth.

For them, the Bentley had to be new, and at least $2m. Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond there were the young fogies, including celebrities such as Jools Holland and Top Gear's James May - people with a genuine appreciation for the quality and dignity inherent in the brand, plus perhaps some suppressed nostalgic aspirations to the landed gentry.

They favoured the older cars - Mulsannes, Ts, even older if they could afford them. They wouldn't have dreamt of buying a virtually identical Rolls-Royce - far too vulgar, all the wrong signals - but a winged B was the bee's knees.

The slide continued for me when it was reported that Ben Affleck had bought a Bentley for Jennifer Lopez, despite the fact that P Diddy had also bought her one, and gathered pace with the inevitable orders from Jay Kay Towers (he bought a new ($349,000) Continental GT earlier this month, and Chez Beckham.

David bought a GT for Victoria on behalf of their sons; the dash is reportedly inscribed: "To Mummy, Happy Christmas 2003. Love from Romeo and Brooklyn."

Meanwhile, the disgraced footballer (or is he? I never did figure that one out) Rio Ferdinand has a Bentley, along with virtually every other premiership star with a half-decent agent.

And, to add insult to injury, professionally angry chef Gordon Ramsay and the anodyne popster Ronan Keating have recently added their names to the annals of Bentley history, too. Both have just bought new Continental GTs.

Prior to Jordan's outing, Bentley was probably wondering if these new owners would put their car at risk of being labelled "the new Jaguar XK8". Now, with Jordan's arrival on the scene, the Bentley is looking more like the "new Capri".

As for Jordan's Azure, these days you are more likely to see them being driven by the wives of British textile tycoons or Hollywood madams. Bentley was once the world's most expensive and glamorous car. What has it done to deserve this?

Bentley Motors is, of course, a noble name. It was founded in 1919 by Walter Owen Bentley and was bought by Rolls-Royce in 1931.

The marque has won Le Mans six times, most recently last year, and for the first half of the last century, its cars were the choice of playboys, maharajahs and even James Bond. A Bentley was as at home blasting down the Mulsanne Straight as it was kerb crawling in Shepherd's Market.

After the Second World War, Bentleys were little more than Rollers with different grills. In the 1980s, the company flirted with extinction when a mere 4 per cent of the Rolls-Royce/Bentley output was Bentleys.

But that, I think, is where the ascendancy to cool status began. While Rollers were two-a-penny and became saddled with a ghastly image, a Bentley was a rarity. And as the cars produced in the 1970s and 80s depreciated to the point where $30,000 would buy you a good one, fashion-savvy car enthusiasts started to snap them up.

At the other end of the scale, the Bentley Azure was for a while the most expensive production car in the world, which made it an automatic must-have for emerging rap stars.

And where rap stars go, premiership footballers inevitably follow, and thus begins the decline until we arrive at the first Bentley to be built under Volkswagen's auspices, the Bentley Continental GT, launched last year.

The GT worries me, and not just because the Beckhams, Keating and Ramsay have all bought one. What worries me is the whole concept of a "cheap", "small" Bentley (these terms are comparative in Bentley land, you understand).

It also worries me that it has a VW engine and running gear - you even start the thing with a standard VW ignition key such as you would find in a Skoda Fabia, which, if I had paid that much for a car, would niggle me each time I turned the thing on.

Even more problematic is that it was styled by Dirk van Braeckel, the same man who did the Skoda Fabia. The Fabia is a superb car; Dirk did an excellent job styling it, and the car was partly responsible for the remarkable turnaround of the Skoda brand over the year.

But once you know he styled the GT, too, you can't shake the likeness - particularly the front end - from your head. When you are styling a Bentley, you don't just bring over all the favourite bits of the last car you did - especially if the last car was a Skoda.

And this is not the lead-in to the familiar car journo's anti-German tirade. The Germans build the best cars in the world. The new Rolls-Royce is a German car, and it is fabulous. The thing is, the Phantom looks like a Rolls-Royce. It feels like a Rolls-Royce. It could be nothing else but a Rolls-Royce.

The Continental GT looks like an expensive German coupe. It could easily be an Audi or a posh VW. As Autocar commented recently: "In producing a smaller, more affordable Bentley, some of the desirability and emotional involvement has been lost."

And when you bear in mind that Autocar has a reputation for erring on the side of sycophancy in its verdicts, this is serious. A Bentley is, largely, an emotional purchase, after all.

BMW has pulled off a masterstroke with the new Roller by realising the only way out of its brand-image hole was to aim for the high ground. It re-launched with a car built to look like Chatsworth on wheels and costing more than $800,000.

Bentley's masters at VW have gone for the low ground, targeting the Mercedes CL and Porsche 911 - not Bentley territory at all.

If the evidence of the recent arrivistes in the Bentley Owners' Club is a litmus, the brand is moving away from its heritage and heading down market.

- INDEPENDENT