2024 Bentley Bentayga Off-Road Review: Broadcast, Pinks Up

To be honest, all my experiences with the Bentayga have been unusual. I tested one last year in my hometown in the Missouri Ozarks, which is a strange place to find a Bentley at all. And I didn’t just drive the thing – I pulled a damn horse trailer with it (as well as a Polaris RZR Pro R). The goal was to make the Bentayga work like a pickup and that’s exactly what we did, dirt roads and all.

Then recently I got into a Bentayga without a trailer and hit the off-road trail. Normally I feel quite comfortable in these situations The ride‘s truck editor and all, but I’ve never seen a car that costs more than my house thrown through mud, boulders, and deep dirt pits. Again, I wouldn’t expect anyone who owns one to treat their car the same way, but like the tow test, this isn’t about what people should Doing. It’s about what the car is can Doing.

Take away the Bentayga’s bodywork and the snazzy ‘Winged B’ logos and you have a solid base for four-wheelers. The boosted V8 sends power to all four wheels through an eight-speed automatic and a Torsen center differential, and the drivetrain is quite good at gaining traction on surfaces like gravel. There’s no front locker or over-the-top off-road features, because if there were it would be a shame. Even though it can do some off-road stuff, it’s better for everyone if it doesn’t inspire too much confidence in its millionaire owners to conquer every obstacle in Moab, trail systems and chassis be damned. It’s built on the Volkswagen Group’s MLB platform, so it’s a unibody, but then again, so was the Jeep XJ.

If anyone tells you they need their hardcore 4×4 for regular trail riding, they are either lying or disillusioned. The Bentayga is more than enough, especially if you opt for the All-Terrain package which adds additional riding modes such as Snow and Grass, Dirt and Gravel, Mud and Trail and Sand with associated adjustable suspension heights and stability control settings. It comes with 285/45 R21 Pirelli Scorpion tires, which combined with 9.7 inches of ground clearance are more than capable: more than a Honda Pilot TrailSport, but less than a Range Rover in the highest suspension.

Hopefully I’m portraying the image accurately here. The Bentayga is not an off-road special. It’s not a total pavement princess either. That’s okay with me.

As I drove up a steep embankment, I was surprised to find that the Bentley’s infotainment screen displayed a lot of relevant data. The first was the roll and pitch angle, which was 23 degrees on the track they built at The Preserve in Rhode Island. It doesn’t look like an old-fashioned inclinometer; it’s more of a simple, digital layout. The 10.9-inch center display also shows an image of the car with corresponding animations for each wheel and its position in the travel zone, with a line that turns red when pressed or extended to the maximum.

Bentley’s four-wheel independent air suspension provides a comfortable ride both on and off road, and while the automaker doesn’t publish explicit wheel-travel statistics, I’d say it’s okay. That was obviously a lot different than an F-150 Raptor, but the articulation didn’t feel too far off from the coil-sprung Toyota Tundra, which lifted a wheel off the ground in each of the purposefully dug holes. It has withstood the trials and tribulations, even on three wheels, so I’m not sure you can ask for much more.

The Bentayga also uses other software to enhance the off-road experience. Hill descent control is a well-known feature of 4x4s these days, and wouldn’t you know it, the Bentayga has it. It works in both driving and reversing, which is useful when reversing out of steep and hairy situations. My thing is that it’s not entirely predictable. While I set the downhill assist to 3 and 4 mph, I noticed it ramped up to 7 mph without any apparent input from me. That’s a problem for obvious reasons, and if it were me I’d stick to manual braking.

Both you and the car benefit from arranging matters yourself. While it’s cool that the Bentayga can careen through a patch of basketball-sized rocks with your foot off the brake, there’s no need for it to try to figure out what it’s doing if you just modulate the pedals yourself. It stops strongly and, because of its torque at low revs, it drives without much throttle and, even better, without much wheelspin. Slow and steady it wins the race off-road, and in the right hands the Bentayga can do that well.

Everything we’ve talked about so far is great, but it’s not the most practical information. What’s more important is how the Bentayga behaves on rough roads. That’s because even if real owners don’t purposely take one to an ORV park, they could very well take it along a mile-long private gravel road to a friend’s house. Or, if not, a quasi-remote camping spot where the Airstream they rented is furnished and waiting for them to arrive.

In that sense, the Bentayga does exceptionally well. There were a few items deliberately placed in the road so we could experience the ride when it gets rough, such as chopped logs and rocks embedded in the sand. You can take those at low cruising speeds and the bumps are less jarring than a New England or SoCal pothole on the freeway. Importantly, they never let the car lose its composure. It’s one thing to be startled by a crashing bump, but it’s another to be unsettled and temporarily lose control of the car’s direction. While manually piloting the Bentayga off-road, I never felt out of control, which says all you really need to know about it. The foundations are there, and that demonstrably outweighs the missing and ultimately unnecessary software.

The Bentayga could be better off the highway, but you and I both know it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s why I will never complain about this rolling, bumpy SUV that can also handle a dirt road at your friend’s house. And if you own a Bentayga, your friend has a huge asset. If I’ve learned anything during my time with the Bentley crew in New England, it’s that you are who you hang out with. For Bentley owners, that means you’re one percent of the 1%, and you probably don’t care about throwing rocks in your daily drive, even if it costs more than my humble abode.

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