So we got a 2012 Bentley Continental GTC

Ah, the Bentley Continental GT. The last time we drove it was on an epic run down Jebel Hafeet at midnight. We’re now too old for shenanigans like that, especially with a million-dirham car. So when we got the convertible version, the Continental GTC, we just did what any actual owner would do, and that is hit every hotel in Dubai this Ramadan to gauge reactions to the car.

But this isn’t the same Bentley Continental that we drove all those years ago. It looks very similar to the old model, but there are numerous external changes, such as the headlights, the bumpers, the tail-lights and, well, that’s about it really.

It’s a big car, but not big enough to be unwieldy. It was pretty easy to manouevre it around city streets, looking stately in the process.

The interior is befitting a car that costs this much. What it lacks in gadgetry, it makes up for in leather. Of course, rear passengers will have the worst seat in the house.

As with all Bentleys we’ve driven, boot space never seems to add up, given the overall size of Bentleys.

Other than for these pictures, we never put the top down. Ramadan and summer conspired against any notion of wind-in-the-hair driving.

And no, we didn’t try to hit every hotel in Dubai, just the ones we were invited to for car-company iftars and so-called suhoors. It turns out we were not invited to a whole bunch of these this year by various European luxury carmakers, probably because we’re actual Muslims. So we appreciated the invites from Ford, Nissan/Infiniti, Volvo and Renault more. Either way, it was fun playing “filthy rich” for a while, having our car parked right up front, and valets insisting we didn’t even need a valet ticket. Had we not insisted on a ticket, I wonder if they’d have remembered our faces when it was time to collect the car?

More in the full review.