I bought a cheap ‘550hp’ Bentley, it was a DISASTER!

I bought this Bentley Continental GT for just £10,000. This Continental GT is owned by Bentley themselves and it's worth £30,000. So, have I bagged myself a bargain or have I made a terrible mistake? I'm Matt Watson and you're watching Car Wow. These cars cost more than £110,000 when they were new, which is about £200,000 in today's money. However, I've already spotted a few reasons why my car has lost about 95% of its original value. Tire pressure monitor not available. Another thing is it always thinks the bonnet's open, right? No, the bonnet's not open. Look, I'll pull this. There you go. That's nice. Oh, you can't slam it. Is it shut? I don't know. Now it's shot. There we go. I've still got the light though, mate. Another thing I've noticed is this. The organ stops don't organ stop. So, listen to this. Hear that noise? Listen. This is what it should sound like. That Yeah. So, we've got that problem. Can you hear that noise? The brake booster. In fact, you know what? If I wait a bit, let's just wait a bit and it'll go away. There we go. So, it's stopped. I'm going to press the brake pedal. There we go. So, that needs fixing. Other than that though, pretty much everything else works. There is one thing I've noticed in this car. Okay. What is it? So, I'm going to put all the windows down. Yeah. Yeah, they work. Great. I'm going to put all the windows up. Go then. Yeah, they're all up. Oh, yeah. It worked. Previously, this one Yeah. refused to go up. Maybe the rest of it will stop working magically as well. I hope so. But that press car isn't completely perfect either, is it? No, actually it's not. So the first thing, there are a few, is the tire pressure monitoring. So that familiar fault. The second thing, which is annoying more than anything, is this armrest here. That side goes down. Oh, it goes down. These B fix themselves. You keep on making up faults on these Bentley. I've been driving around with this up here, and it's been bugging me all day. But now, oh, now it works. Something that doesn't work or works too well is the fan. You cannot turn it off. That's all the way down to zero and I can still feel it blowing. Yeah, it is still blowing. Put it all the way up high. Feels the same. So, there's one speed and it's always on. Yeah, it's a proper blower Bentley. These old Bentley 6 L W12s are supposed to have 550 horsepower and 650 new m of torque as is way off that. I wonder how close this press car is to those actual figures. Well, it's funny you should ask because when this got delivered, I noticed the only thing they left in it apart from the key was this, which is actually a dinoaph of our car. So, all right. Okay. Horsepower. Look. Bang on. 550. It's beautiful. Yeah. And then peak torque is wa What? Nearly 100 new meters more than it should have. 750. And then it holds like above the the claim 650 all the way down to 6,000 RPM. That's madness. So this is one healthy Bentley W12. I have a sneaking suspicion my GT isn't in such fine fettle. So let's see how these cars compare with the good old-fashioned 1/4 mile track race. 3 2 1 Yeah. Rockets off the line. Oh no, now I'm dropping that. Oh, he's absolutely destroyed me. Look at that. Big difference. Not good. So Nick, my car did n to 60 in 4.96 seconds and the standing quarter mile in 13.5. What numbers have you got? It did n 60 in 6.48 seconds and the 1/4 mile in 14.84. Not good. Okay, 14.84. So over a second over the quarter mile. There's something definitely wrong with it, but I knew that already. When I originally bought this car, I put it on a dyno at AI Performance and the news wasn't good. So, we're getting what? 360 horsepower the crank. Yeah. Not 560. Few ponies have left the ranch. That's almost 200 horsepower less than it should have. We tried clearing the fork codes, but that actually made things worse. So, my 6 L W12 Bentley was actually producing around 320 horsepower. This was probably caused by some boost pressure sensors which had failed, but you have to remove the whole engine and differential to replace them. This is a massive job and could cost over £8,000. However, I have a theory about this old Bentley. So, I wanted to jump back into my car and test it out. You know what, Nick? While drag racing is all well and good, it's not realistic. If this car is good enough for just real world cruising about, maybe we can put up with the dent in performance. Let's try another acceleration test. But this time, what we're going to do is just be cruising along in normal mode, in drive, not sport. And then we're going to floor it at 30 mph, and see how long it takes us to get to 70. And I want you to shout out when you're doing 70. Okay, let's see if there's much of a difference. Cruising along at 30. Dye dah. 3 2 1 go. Oh, kick down. It has done. Kick down. Come on. There we go. God, this is quick. 70. 70. You know what, Nick? You were ahead of me for sure. I'm not sure whether I'm willing to spend over 20 grand for that extra pace. It's not miles behind. And you can't go faster than 70. Really, not legally. You can't. Unfortunately, this lack of power wasn't my car's only problem. The team at RE Performance identified a load of other issues, too. The whole front suspension was worn out. The brake vacuum pump needed fixing. The car needed two new handbrake motors, and it was overdue a major service. The car would almost certainly fail its next because of worn front brakes and split CV boots. I asked a Bentley specialist how much it would cost to fix all of this and the engine fault and try and make my car as good as new. And including labor, I was told it would come to £26,000. I could almost buy Bentley's own GT for that. To be perfectly honest with you, Nick, there's no way I'm spending 30 grand to do this car. It's just good money after bad. I can't sell it because I know it's got some faults. I just wouldn't feel right. What we could do, though, is see how much money we could get for it if we scrapped it cuz it's got a lot of good bits like the interior, which I reckon, could fetch quite a bit of money. But why don't you send it to a Bentley part specialist and see if we broke it what we could make. Okay, let's do it. Yeah. Okay. So, we're at Flying Spares. This is Andy. Hi, Andy. Hi, Nick. What sort of thing do you normally work with here? What sort of cars? Uh, anything from your earliest like Mark 6s and R Types up to the Continental GTs. You name it. If it's from the Rolls-Royce and Bentley, we've dealt with it. Great stuff. So, hopefully you'll know what this is worth. Yeah. Let's take a look around it and see if we have got some valuable parts. Headlights. a little bit tired and say at the moment these would be worth £300 but good would be £600. Nice. The what about the grill? Is that worth anything? Grill if it was good be worth around about 600 700 but because it's got the crack at the top probably about £300. Okay. And the front bumper maybe. Is that worth anything? Lovely. Absolutely lovely. Secondhand we sell them for quite a good amount. So it would sell for about £1,000. Nice. I like the sound of that. Yours is good. Excellent. Another thing I wanted to ask you Andy is not the bonnet struts. They're clearly rubbish. This W12 is that worth anything? Unfortunately, even in good condition, it's just so problematic in that lump. We like to sell our parts with like 12 months warranty. Yeah. We don't like to warrant them. So, that just goes straight in the bin. It doesn't go in the bin, though. We We will still sell bits off it, but the labor in putting one of those in, taking it out. It's just not worth it. Right. Okay. Never mind. What about down the side? Down the side, it's lovely. Wheels are good. In the condition, there may be a little bit of a refurb, but they would be worth £1,000 if they were mint. Okay. Okay. That's We can work with that. We can work with that. That's good. Spoilers up already. So, spoilers. Spoiler works. That's it. Great. Spoilers are always worth money. Exact amount. I can't think off the top of my head because there's lots of different bits to it. Yeah. But it works. So, I know all components are good. Excellent. And what about the back? Anything else? Back's lovely. Tail lights. As long as they work fine. They're about £800 each. Perfect. Let's take a look inside, shall we? Oh, she's nice. Nice color combo. All good. Seats. Unfortunately, they look lovely. Not a huge demand. Oh, really? No. No. Even though these are the Muller ones. The Muller ones. They've got the nice stitching on them that shows that they're monitor. But again, we can't sell seats. They're just big, get in the way. Okay. So, how much for them, do you reckon? 22 250 each. Okay. So, is there anything in here that is desirable? There is switches on the door there. Okay. That's worth money to me. They're all only sold as a whole panel. Switches on the seats. Headlight switch, start stop switch, and the hazard switch. All worth a decent amount in there. Okay. And these are good because they've still got their chrome. They've still got their chrome on. They've not gone sharp. I didn't think they've gone sharp. Nope. They haven't. Good. So, well, that's a bit disappointing about the seats, but should we uh should we find out how much the whole car is worth then? And why not? How much do you think if you break this car down, you'd get for all the bits? We could end up seeing up to 20,000 off this. Oh, £20,000. That's amazing. But it does take time, right? Of course. Okay. It could be 2 years before we see all of that off it. Okay. That's that is a long time. And obviously that's your time costs money. So, you have to budget that in. We take it off, we clean it, we check it, so it goes into stock if it's good. and then we can sell it. So with that in mind, your job is to also go out and find cars, isn't it? It is. Yeah. I buy and sell them. So how much would you budget if you went to see our car to buy it for spares? I would only really want to part with for ourselves say sort of about65,000. Okay. Uh I think we might have to go back to the drawing board on that one. To be perfectly honest with you, Nick, I think the splitting it for parts price is an option. It's not too bad, but I don't want to do that just yet. Maybe I can actually enjoy just driving this thing about a bit, you know, hooding around. Well, not that fast in a Bentley just tootling about. Is it really that much worse than this better Bentley from Bentley? Well, there is one way we can find out. We decided to drive both cars back to back to uncover the truth about my car's worn out suspension and tired brakes. So, for just mooching about, this feels okay, perfectly fine. I got the suspension in the soft setting. Got a nice Woo from the W12. It's all right. This how you're going to drive it on the road. I get why they call it continental. It's exactly the sort of thing you'd drive to France back in the early 2000s. There are a few creeks back there. The brakes aren't great. Oh, I think I'm feeling the problems with the turbo a little bit when you try to accelerate out of a bend. Let's go into sports mode. See if it helps it any. Oh, yeah. Much better. Steering's bit heavy, but you know what? It's a big car. Totally manageable. All feels nice and tight. Everything seems to work. Brakes are good. Doesn't even lean that much. If you weren't that experienced, you just think, "Oh, yeah. This is fine." Put your foot down and it doesn't like to kick down this gearbox. All brakes. All brakes. Actually, the gearbox is better in comfort. Just leave it. Just chilling. Oh, when you accelerate, so much torque. It's nice. Even sounds quite good, you know, not doing anything untoward. is all very predictable. It's not that sporty, but it's fast enough. It's adequate. 10 grand. Think what else you can get for 10 grand. Many cars at £10,000 wouldn't feel as nice as this does. I want to know though how much nicer the 30 grand Bentley feels. Was I about to learn the ugly truth about my cheap car? Was I going to be in for a pleasant surprise? Marginally, this car goes down the road better. The suspension just seems more wafty, less busy. Oh, that's a bit of a weird noise already. That was some grumble from the suspension. Front left is a bit noisy. Oh, and I can hear some creeks behind my ear. There's a lot more rattles over these bumps. There are a few less rattles and creeks, but then this has done 20,000 mi. The experience though isn't night and day. Steering's mostly the same. Still quite heavy, but back to backing, you know, this is the better car for sure. But if you didn't have the experience of testing a 30 grand Bentley with 33,000 miles on the clock, you wouldn't know. 20 grand nicer, or should I say three times nicer, cuz that's the price difference. Nope. However, I do feel now I've tested this car, the is a little bit sick. Nick, how did you find it? For a 10 grand car, it was acceptable. I think it was acceptable. Yeah. It's not as good as the Bentley own Bentley, is it? No. It was a shame I drove that one. Really? Yeah. But if you hadn't driven that, you could live with this. And anyway, really with Bentley, the drive isn't the be all and end all. It's all about the image, isn't it? It's about the image. So, Nick, what we need to do is compare how these cars look. Yes. But it's a little bit unfair right now, isn't it? It certainly is cuz this has come direct from Bentley. So, it's immaculate. This thing, I've had it in a lockup for about a year and say it's a bit grimy. So before we compare them, what we're going to do is get this validated at Greenhouse Fleet Services. They're going to give it a thorough going over and then we're going to compare the cars. Will this one really be worth three times that in terms of the looks? I'm not convinced, but let's get it clean. I'll tell you what, Nick. This old Bentley has scrubbed up pretty well. It looks a lot better than it did. Even this close, it's really not bad. I prefer the green, but inside I reckon the black works better. I'm loving the mullina stitching here. That is very nice. And that dark walnut. It goes, doesn't it? It looks a lot better than this. Now, I do like a light interior, but I'm not sure about this caramel color. The green on the dash is bit Yeah, the olive leather is not working for me. No. But do you know what? It's all about the quality of them at close inspection. So, I have an idea. This is Emily. She works in quality control for greenhouse fleet services. And it's her job to assess new cars and spot any damage before they go out to customers. So, Emily, how many cars do you check over each day? So, usually around 150 up to 200 a day. What does that involve? What do you do? So, I'll go around all the cars, make sure there's it's damage free, the valet is good, and just ready for the customer to enjoy. Okay. So, what I want you to do is look around each of these cars, do your normal job, and then rate them out of 10. All right. Good luck. So, Emily, what I'd like you to do is give me your scores for both of these cars. Start with the green car. How was it? It was good. I'd probably rate it about an eight. An eight. I thought it' be like a 10. What What's wrong with it? It's got a few blemishes around the car, but nowhere near as much as the black one. Really? Was that quite bad? Okay. So, what you going to score that one then? A five. A a five. You're harsh. I thought that one would be like nine and a half and this one would be like a seven. What's wrong with this? Uh, it's got a lot more damage than the green one, and it's a lot more noticeable. Okay, I think you're a lot harsher judge than I am as far as I'm concerned. This is absolutely fine. I don't know what you're talking about, but I reckon most people would be fairly impressed by my old Continental GT, especially considering it cost me only £10,000. However, all this would be for nothing if I couldn't drive this car on the road. And right now there was no way it was going to pass an MOT and that was a big problem. We've got a bit of a dilemma of what to do with this car neck. I'm not sure whether we should just go ahead and scrap it or do we try and fix the things that we need for it to go through the MOT, but even then we don't know for sure that it's going to pass. So it could be more money down the drain. What do you reckon? I think we should fix what we know is stopping it passing the give it the best chance to get another year's life on the road. Uhhuh. And if it fails, that's it. Game over. But if it doesn't, you haven't actually spent that much money on it. And it's still a very cheap bent boot. So that's what I've decided to do. And I've come to Proa Auto, who are going to help me put this bent boot right. And hopefully they're going to fix it for as little money as possible. To get the car through the MOT, we need to do three things. We need to do the brake disc, the brake pads, and new CV boots. So this is Matt. Matt's going to be working on the car. What are these bents like? Similar to your Audi's. Audi's Volkswagens. It can be a bit of a pain. It depends how easily everything comes apart. And that's always the way, isn't it? How much rust there is in there. We're only going to find out by getting it up in the air then. So, let's get on with it then, Matt. Let's do it. You might be wondering why I'm not getting Matt to fix all the other problems, too. Well, that's because the MOT test is all about safety. It doesn't assess how much power the engine makes, but it will check things like the emissions level, which seemed okay in this car. Similarly, it doesn't check how comfortable a car is to drive, but it will check how well the brakes perform. And that was the first issue we needed to fix. Have a look at the corrosion on the brake disc. So this is the inside edge. It's terrible. Look at that lip. This wouldn't necessarily fail the MOT. It would be an advisory, but when you're braking in the car, you can feel the steering wheel jitter. So these need to be changed from a safety point of view. Always stay safe. And while the brakes are off, we can assess the drive shafts to replace the cracked CV boot. Or we tried to at least. So we've got a bit of a problem with this bolt which connects to the drive shaft. The other side was easy to remove. This one is absolutely having none of it. So, we're going to have to use an old mechanics trick to get it loose. We've got the under tray removed. So, you can see here the split CV boot. Look, that cheap part that isn't easy to get to. We need to fix. So, we got to undo these bolts and we got to undo this part, this part, this part so we can slide this whole hub out and slide the drive shaft out so we can get the new CV boot over it. Problem is the first stage. Now, what is it, Matt? What's the issue you got? They've been previously overtightened. They've been chewed up. It makes it difficult to get onto them, difficult to undo. I'm going to have to tap a socket on there. Go from there. Okay. Just suck it and see. See what happens. Patience and probably some bruised knuckles. This sort of thing makes me think my Bentley might not have been maintained particularly well in the past. But at least fixing this particular issue shouldn't cost too much. Well, so long as Matt was able to remove the rest of the drive shaft. You got your CV joints and your CV boots. I believe that CV joint has to come off. To do the inner CV boots on. Once that can push forward, that should all come apart. Be able to come out of the hub and hopefully twist it round. Hopefully, take it to the bench and do the CV boots. They don't make it easy, do they? But after this rocky start, Matt was able to remove all the necessary suspension bolts and it was up to me to release the drive shaft. So, we've got all the arms disconnected now and the other end of the drive shaft is. So, I'm just going to give it a bit of a cheeky whack and hopefully it should. Yes, it's loose. See if you can get it out. Come on. Yep. Environment. Come on. Out we go. And this is the offending item. So, now we need to get this off here and replace this boot. I decided to replace these split CV boots just in time because the rest of the drive shafts looked in decent condition and hadn't been affected by any dirt or grit. And this meant Matt was able to strip them down and fit the new boots. And all it took was a little persuasion. Matt's done all the dirty work. Got the grease in these. They're ready to go back on the car and we're going to put it all back together again. Since we'd already loosened all the stubborn bolts, it was actually pretty simple to refit the drive shafts. And the giant brake disc and pads went on without any hassle, too. Looks like the car is done. Let's find out how it went. So then, Mark, is it all fixed? Yes, it's all fixed. All good. Excellent. Right. So, now I need to pay the bill. I wonder how much it's going to come to. Okay, it's not too bad. Look, just over £1,000. So, now I need to send it for anote. Hopefully, it'll pass, but you never know with these things. In total, I'd spent less than £12,000 buying the Bentley and fixing some of the key issues, which is less than half what it cost me to buy a near mint example like the one I'd driven earlier. But had I done enough to get it through the or would I be about to get a very nasty surprise? I can't believe it. The plumbing car failed. What an absolute nightmare. Joking. Look, it passed. I have anote certificate for it. We are game on. And I was over the moon. Sure, this Bentley is slower than it should be, and it doesn't drive quite as well as a Continental should, and it's got a bit of cosmetic damage, too. But I still get to waft around in this lovely interior. And the sound of that W12 is lovely, even if it is only delivering about 2/3 of the horsepower it should. And the best thing is, this car has cost me less to buy than a Dacia spring electric car. I definitely thought I'd made the right decision to save this old Bentley. However, just one week later, I've just turned up a car wow drag race shoot in the Bentley and on the way here, engine warning light has come on. Looks like I might be selling this thing for blowing parts sooner than I thought. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, give it a like. You can watch some other videos by clicking on the windows and why not comment to let me know of some other cars you'd like to see me buy. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. Hopefully I'll have more luck