It’s Time to Sell the Not-Mine Bentley Continental

Wait, what?

To quote Austin Powers, “Honestly, it’s not mine.”

I have a cousin who is a powerhouse of a business owner, and is so crisply decisive about things that she makes me cringe at my tendency to obsess over insignificant decisions. Years back, she and her husband (who sadly passed a few years ago) had leased her a Jaguar XK8 convertible, and she loved how it made her feel like Grace Kelly driving her Sunbeam Alpine in To Catch a Thief. When she turned 80 two years ago, her neighbor mentioned that he was about to trade in his 2014 Bentley Continental GTC V8 convertible on a new Bentley, and thought “Hmmmm.” She sought advice from her second-in-command at her business who is a car-guy friend of mine. He advised against it because it’s a bespoke vehicle, and maintenance costs were likely to eat her alive. She bought it anyway.

The first summer she owned it was fabulous. Her business is in Boston, but she lives in the beach community of Nahant, Massachusetts—an island connected to the mainland by a causeway—and got to have her Grace Kelly moments. But her lieutenant was correct. Over the next two years, the bills from the dealership totaled twenty grand. It wasn’t that the car was unreliable, or even that the scheduled maintenance costs were criminal. It was that the combination of the cost of things that were specific to the car (as her employee said, “bespoke”) and the cost of keeping it cosmetically intact was astronomical.

While doing the annual state inspection, the dealership found that water had destroyed the third brake light and the reverse lights, and one of the front LED fog lamps needed replacement. The parts cost for these items came to $4973, and with labor, the repair bill was $7734. Fixing a tiny amount of paint bubbling behind the front wheel set her back another $7145. Refinishing the front bumper cover to fix a small split in the paint from a parking lot tap and replacing the peeling Bentley emblem on the trunk also came with sticker-shock bills.

In June, she decided that she’d use the car for one more summer, but wanted it gone after Labor Day. All-in, she had well over a hundred grand in the car and was hoping to get $85,000. She’s an enormously capable person, but had never sold a car before (her husband had always handled that), much less a car like this. The task of selling it could’ve gone to her car-guy employee, but he and I talked about it, and if it was going to wind up on Bring a Trailer, we decided that, as I’d sold cars on BaT before, I was the better party.

Over the summer, I began to do my due diligence. I have a friend who owns a repair and restoration shop that’s an authorized Rolls-Royce and Bentley service center. He said that he could handle the entire sale, but the commission was significant, and he candidly advised that I could photograph the car and put it on BaT just as easily as he could. I broached the subject of the car’s value and my cousin’s target price with him. He said that it was difficult to tell without seeing it, but with depreciation and a soft market, the car would have to be pretty exceptional to bring $85k.

I relayed that caution to my cousin. Understandably, she wanted to know an expected sale price. I looked online and saw many 2014 or similar Continental GTCs with a mid-$80k asking price, but asking price is not selling price. I searched on BaT and made a spreadsheet of sales data for GTCs within a two-year window, and immediately realized that I needed more information. There are several variations of the GTC—V8, V8 Speed, and W12—and I didn’t know which one hers was.

Further, to sell it, I needed to know the Bentley names for the exterior and interior colors (you can’t just say “black” and “gray”) and what options it was equipped with. I wrote to Bentley on my cousin’s behalf, and a day later I received a six-page Word document containing the car’s bespoke build sheet, from which I learned that the car was the 500-horsepower V-8 with the “Mulliner Driving Specification Package” which included drilled aluminum pedals, Bentley-logo embroidery in the headrests, quilted perforated leather, and some other bling. I also learned that the exterior and interior colors were both “Beluga.” I couldn’t help thinking of the episode of Futurama where Amy Wong is buying a car and the salesman is trying to upsell her on the luxury edition (“The dashboard is inlaid with the beaks of a thousand eagles. Also, there are some eagles under the floorboards. And jet… the luxury edition has so much more eagle”). Once I saw the data, I told my cousin that she probably needed to temper her expectations, and we’d need to see what BaT recommended as a reserve.

Now, I’ve sold a few cars on BaT before, but they’re all been 1970s-era BMWs. I’d never sold anything remotely like this. I entered into BaT’s persnickety application process, including listing the paint and bodywork events of the bumper-tap and the fender refinishing. I drove up to Nahant, wiped a few spots off the Bentley’s paint with Meguiar’s Quick Detailer, and photographed the car. I’m generally not a fan of sheepskin seat covers, but these were put on in 2016 by the previous owner, and when I pulled them off for photos, the seats under them looked dead mint. I also shot the obligatory driving video where I demonstrated the car’s 500 hp.

But during the photography, I noticed that the right front wheel clearly had some curb rash. This was surprising because one of the service records showed that all four wheels had recently been refinished. I asked my cousin, she referred me to her employee/my friend who handled the car’s maintenance, and put him on speakerphone where he diplomatically said that the rash was due to “operator error.” I advised her that this was problematic because if the car was being represented as one that had every cosmetic issue addressed, the rashed wheel didn’t fit the story.

To my surprise, she did her hyper-decisive thing and said “You know what? I’m done. I’m afraid to drive it and damage it. Just take it now and sell it.” I told her that I wasn’t in a position to take it—I was going on vacation at the end of August, and I had nowhere to put it. Besides, I said, I didn’t want my detail-oriented approach to derail her plan to enjoy the car through the end of the summer. She acquiesced.

BaT accepted the car, but there was a big disconnect on the reserve. They sent me a link to a recently-completed auction for a similar GTC V8 in California with fewer miles that sold for $67k, and recommended listing her car with a $55k reserve. She nearly pulled the auction, but after thinking about it overnight, she decided that the car needed to go. I set things up with BaT to list the car after Labor Day.

A few days later, my cousin called me in a bit of a panic, saying that she drove the car to a manicure and parked it in a lot, and when she came out, the driver’s-side mirror was twisted around 180 degrees. There were no marks on it from impact, so she wondered if it was just vandalism. She sent me a photo which I forwarded to my friend who owns the Bentley service shop and asked if that’s part of the normal fold-back mechanism. He said that that was beyond the normal range of motion, but advised that I had little to lose by trying to fold it back. I dropped everything and drove back to Nahant. With my cousin watching, I gently applied more and more twisting pressure until finally the mirror began to move, then went back into its regular detent. She thanked me profusely, but this time, she really was afraid to continue driving the car prior to its sale, and really did want it gone. I said I’d Uber up there the next day and take it.

But the problem of where to store it remained. I didn’t have the space for it in my garage, and even if I did, I was afraid that a can of brake cleaner would fall off a shelf and damage the paint. I barely had room for it in the driveway, and even if I did, I was afraid that one of my wife’s tomato pots on the garage roof would blow off in a storm and land on it. I searched online for short-term storage and couldn’t find anything nearby.

Then I had a thought.

Jeanette.

Readers of this column may recall the story of Hank and his Lincoln. When we moved into our house 32 years ago, my neighbor Hank seemed like a nice guy, but the relationship rapidly soured. For decades he made my automotive life hell, calling the police on me if he suspected I was driving unregistered vehicles, and leading a charge to prevent me from building the first version of my garage that required a zoning variance. As his health started to fail, I began blowing out his driveway, and both he and his wife Jeanette returned to being nice to me and Maire Anne. After Hank passed, Jeanette gave me the cover that Hank used to put on his beloved garage-kept Lincoln. The Lincoln is gone, but Jeanette is 98 and still driving to the grocery store and hair appointments. I’ve been the caretaker of her 22,000-mile Honda Accord, keeping the battery charged, and getting it inspected for her. The car lives at the top of her driveway. I didn’t think there was anything in her garage.

So I asked Jeanette. I laid out the story of my cousin’s Bentley and how I needed to take delivery of it and have somewhere safe and nearby to put it while I sold it for her. She said the garage was empty except for an old futon mattress, and that if I needed the space for a car, I could put one in there for as long as I’d like. I disposed of the mattress, swept out the garage, took an Uber up to Nahant, got the Bentley, drove it to the dealership to have the right front wheel re-refinished, and a few days later put the Bentley in Jeanette’s garage. With the car cover from Hank’s beloved Lincoln on it. Talk about a circle-of-life event.

The auction went live on BaT the morning after Labor Day. Two days later, someone local wanted to come and see the Bentley. I carefully pulled it out of Jeanette’s garage for the test-drive. When it was over, I parked the beautiful black Bentley with the top still down on the street in front of her house. I was about to put the top up and pull it back into her garage when I noticed Jeanette sitting on her front porch, and decided to do the thing that needed to be done. I walked up the steps and knocked on the porch door.

“Want a ride?” I asked.

It took her a few seconds to understand. “IN THE BENTLEY?” she asked. I nodded. She began to scurry down the stairs as if she was in danger of my changing my mind.

“You’re going to need your sunglasses,” I said.

I helped her get into the car, which wasn’t really necessary—she’s a remarkably spry 98-year-old. Even before we drove off, she said “My brother is never going to believe that I got a ride IN A BENTLEY!” (Her brother is a hundred and three.)

“Well,” I said, “We’re going to give him the evidence.” I shot a few pics on my phone. Neither of them are texters, so after the drive, I went down to the local CVS, and had two sets of prints made, one for her and the other for her brother.

As the auction entered its final day, I swapped a few messages with my car-guy friend who works for my cousin and who likely drove the car more than she did. “I hope you drove it in sport mode,” he said.

“I did not,” I said. “I didn’t see the switch.”

“There are two separate mechanisms,” he said. “There’s moving the shift lever all the way down to the “S” position which makes both shifting and acceleration a lot crisper. And there’s using the push button to enter setup on the touchscreen to make the suspension firmer.”

Well, obviously I wouldn’t be fiducially responsible to my cousin if I didn’t do everything possible to engage possible bidders, right? So I switched on these two options, took the car a quick drive, and shot a short video. It was only while editing it that I realized that I’d hit triple digits. You can see what hell I’m willing to go through for family here. If I owned it, I’d leave these options enabled 24/7. (The car also has paddle shifters, but I’d never used them before on any car. I tapped up and down once and left it at that.)

The auction results were disappointing but not surprising. The confluence of it being a life-long New England car, having had a repair to address paint bubbling in one front fender, and having no paper service records from her neighbor who owned it from 2016 through 2022 (though he was kind enough to swap emails with me that I quoted on BaT) made for a low price ceiling. It sold for $55,000—exactly the reserve price that BaT had set. I was glad that I’d engaged in expectation management in my conversations with my cousin. She was more than fine with the result, and extremely grateful—the car needed to go, I got it sold, and I managed all aspects of the sale. I talked her through the title-signing and wire-transfer process, and facilitated the buyer’s shipping the car down to Dallas.

There were a few take-aways from the experience. Firstly, I was happy to do this for a beloved family member, and her gratitude was effusive. As my mother used to say, what may not be a big deal to you may be a big deal to someone else. Second, I felt like I’d left it all on the field; I don’t know what else could’ve been done to maximize sale price. Third, there was the sweetness of the wonderful reciprocal favor from Jeanette. When the Bentley was gone, I thanked her profusely. Unknowingly echoing what I said to my cousin, she said, “I’m so happy I was able to do this favor for you.”

But the thing that affected me the most was the fact that all this was occurring during the ups and downs of my experience with the FrankenThirty—the 1988 BMW E30 325is I bought that turned out to have a nose and engine from an earlier car. I‘ve long said that I regard risk differently than most car folks. The ubiquitous advice is to buy the best car in the best condition, as that’s the one most likely to experience the biggest appreciation in value. I instead tend to bottom-feed. The hypothetical example I give is that if I buy a $50,000 car and I’m half-wrong about it in terms of condition or provenance or whatever, I’m potentially out twenty-five grand, whereas if I buy a $5,000 car and I’m half-wrong about it, I’m out only $2500. Granted, a 2014 Bentley GTC V8 isn’t a “drive the investment vehicle” kind of car (and you can argue that any luxo-barge is likely to be a depreciation nightmare), but I imagine that if my cousin had known the risk—that the financial downside of two summers of enjoyment of the car could be as huge as it was—she likely wouldn’t have bought it.

I go back and forth over whether the FrankenThirty was a mistake, but even if it was, it’s a small one. Then again, it’s never going to make anyone feel like Grace Kelley.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.