I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get a bit bored with Rolls Royce hogging the limelight with its current Phantom and soon-to-be-released Ghost models. Sure, they represent the pinnacle of automotive luxury and craftsmanship and cost more than some bungalows, but what makes cars and carmakers so exciting is variety and competition. So, right on cue, comes a car with more cow skin, mahogany side-board and ninety-setting heated massage parlour than you can shake a laser-guided, hand stitched keyless entry device at. The Bentley Mulsanne.

The Geneva Motor Show gave those in pin-stripes a chance to have a look around; perusing the Mulsanne options lists is definitely a leather-bound, sit-down job. Maybe even bedtime reading material. A twin turbo charged 6.75 litre V8 provides the 505hp and simply colossal 725 lb-ft of torque. If you aren’t familiar with torque, I’ll leave it as this; open the throttle in a Mulsanne and your rear passenger’s gin and tonic will be partly on his or her lap – and partly on the parcel shelf.

And there isn’t any waiting about for the pelvis-crushing power, because from just 1750 rpm it charges down the drive shaft to a set of extremely pricey 20 inch wheels. However, you won’t hear much of that from within the hand built interior, each car’s inside taking 170 hours to stitch, saw and chisel. That is the beauty of true premium cars like the Mulsanne and Rolls Royce Phantom; they really are sourced and built using the finest natural materials by the best in the business.

A steering wheel taking a man in a white coat 15 hours to stitch points the car where you want it, as you make your way through no less than eight automatically changed gears. Sport mode is available, but you may as well fit slick tyres to a JCB or have a ten CD auto-changer in Michael Schumacher’s new F1 car, because its existence is ridiculous. The Mulsanne isn’t for doing sporty things, it’s for wafting and showing off and while I’m sure it will go sideways at 150 mph as well as any Ferrari, no tree on this earth will stop you careering off the local B road and into a ravine. 

Prices will be over £200,000 when the Bentley goes on sale mid-2010, but to be quite honest, with an options list like this you can pretty much name your own. This one is for the very-wealthy only, apart from putting up the initial money to put it on the drive, service costs, fuel and road tax will probably haunt you for the rest of your life. So will the fact that one day you will wake up to find the Mulsanne has depreciated faster than Great Britain’s financial world-rankings. Enough of that nay-saying though, where’s my cravat?