CURRENTLY SITTING on my driveway courtesy of our company’s ever-changing fleet of project cars is a Bentley Continental Flying Spur, which weighs in at a hefty 2.5 tonnes, that mass being the main reason why it needs a 6-litre engine, 12 cylinders and two turbochargers to provide performance worthy of the price tag.
And that’s generally been the inescapable law of physics relating to luxury cars, ever since the dawn of motoring: a big heavy car needs a big heavy engine which needs big quantities of fuel to propel it at acceptable pace.
The fact that luxury cars didn’t actually have to be quite so heavy was conveniently overlooked in Munich, Stuttgart and Crewe but Ford Motor Company was keen to investigate the weight-saving properties of using aluminium in car construction and it was one of the few occasions where Jaguar’s
