Luxury Titans of 1998: CL600 vs Continental T

It must have been nice to be a titan of industry in the 1990s. Before the tech world made thousands of overnight millionaires and billionaires, if you were rich in the 1990s, you could hold your head high as part of a small club of the monied elite. Your car was a key way to show your status, and in the mid-1990s, there were only two real choices.

In the world of personal luxury coupes, no two companies have done more to advance the genre than Mercedes-Benz and Bentley. Although they approach car building from completely different angles, their results are nothing short of spectacular. Especially when it comes to the pair we are driving today.

Seeing a 1998 Bentley Continental T and 1998 Mercedes-Benz CL600 parked up along the side of a country road almost feels wrong. These cars are more at home in the parking spot next to the front door of a glass office building or driving to a private marina en route to the owner’s yacht. But today, we get to experience what they are like behind the wheel and pretend to be the king of the world for a day.

The first car we hopped in was the Bentley. There is no doubt that the Continental T is one of the best-looking cars of the era, with its flared fenders and shortened wheelbase compared to the Continental R on which it is based. Finished in a perfect shade of British Racing Green, the award for road presence goes to the Bentley before we even take off.

On the inside, it is equally as spectacular, with leather covering nearly every surface and sportier turned aluminum on the dashboard and center console in the place of wood trim. The dashboard has a very World War II airplane look and feel with a large speedometer and tach in front of you and a smattering of auxiliary gauges off to the side that ring a large red engine start button.

Pressing that button stirs the 6.75-liter turbocharged V8 to life – with an idle speed of about 450 rpm, the Continental rides a wave of low-down torque around town, with the 4-speed auto box shifting gears at sub-2,000 rpm. With 420 horsepower and a stunning 650 lb-ft of torque on tap, you don’t need to rev the Continental to extract performance – which is good, seeing as the redline sits at a diesel-like 4,500 rpm.

But when the road gets twisty, don’t expect a sports car here. Sure, the Continental T is the “sportier” variant of the Continental lineup, but the handling ultimately feels quite sloppy and doesn’t inspire much confidence. This probably shouldn’t come as a huge surprise as Continental’s chassis shares much with Rolls-Royce/Bentley SZ chassis, which dates back to 1980, and was hardly designed at that time with cornering dynamics in mind.

In stark contrast to the Bentley sits the CL600. While the Bentley feels like a slice of the old world, the W140 S-Class is the epitome of cutting-edge. Widely regarded as one of the most over-developed cars of all time, the W140 chassis cost more than $1,000,000,000 in 1980s money to engineer, more than doubling the expected budget. After just a few minutes of driving, we can comfortably say that the development money was well spent.

In CL600 guise, this car is powered by Mercedes’s new M120 V12, the same unit that was fitted in the first version of the Pagani Zonda C12 later on. With 6.0 liters of displacement, this naturally aspirated engine produces 390 horsepower and 420 lb-ft of torque, happily pulling towards a 6,000 rpm redline. Although the low-down torque of the Bentley is missing, the turbine-like smoothness offered by the V12 feels far more refined and this car honestly feels faster in most driving circumstances. The steering is also far tighter and allows you to feel what your tires are doing, giving you that classic feeling of Mercedes solidity.

If the interior of the Bentley felt like a World War II airplane, the interior of the CL600 is closer to a modern private jet. There are many buttons and switches to control the digital HVAC, stereo, power rear headrests, and even a powered rear view mirror. The W140 is complex, but things come to you quickly.

For two cars that occupy the same segment, it’s hard to imagine they could be more different. One is a hand-built British bulldog that doesn’t hide its decades-old roots, and the other a precise German barge that costs the GDP of a small country to develop. Now, more than 25 years later, neither of these cars is exactly easy to live with from a maintenance perspective but which one is better?

For our money, the CL600 is the car to have. It may not have the presence of the Continental T driving down the road, but when you’re the one behind the wheel, what the people outside the car think doesn’t matter. There is no comparison from the driver’s seat on a windy road.

On the other hand, if you are a 21st-century titan of industry looking for a tasteful car to drive to your country club, why not pick up one of each and decide for yourself?