Named after a long, fast straightaway at the Le Mans racing track in France, the Mulsanne is part of the company's plan to re-establish itself as a top-tier maker of exclusive luxury cars -- sales have been drastically down. The new model will compete with a handful of other rarefied sedans already on the market, including the Maybach 57 and Rolls-Royce Phantom. Bentley, a British unit of German carmaker Volkswagen AG, has not named an exact price for the new car, which will go on sale in the U.S. a year from now. But since the Rolls-Royce Phantom, built by BMW AG, and Maybach 57, part of the Daimler AG family, both cost closer to $400,000, the less-costly Mulsanne will take advantage of a largely untapped sweet spot in luxury-car pricing.
While there certainly are people who can afford the Mulsanne, its release into a struggling economy may be a case of bad timing. Bentley says it expects worldwide sales of its current cars, priced mostly between $150,000 and $200,000, to total about 4,500 vehicles for 2009, down from 10,040 in 2007 and 7,600 in 2008. In a more acute case of poor timing, the Mulsanne refused to start during the preview and had to be manually pushed off its truck and into the display gallery (see video).
