I love a good gimmick. To me, cars these days are far too straight-laced and serious. I want some whimsy in my automobile – some tomfoolery. Luckily for me, Bentley is delivering on just that. I just finished up a week-long loan of a very well-appointed Continental GTC Azure, and overall the convertible was very lovely – but one thing stuck out to me above all else: its rotating screen – the Forbidden Toblerone. Sure, it’s actually called the Bentley Rotating Display, but Forbidden Toblerone is a lot more fun.
As standard, the Conti comes with a 12.3-inch infotainment screen. On its own, it works really well and blah blah blah who cares. It’s an infotainment screen. It works, but there’s very little pageantry. That’s where Bentley’s engineers and designers came in. They decided the center stack needed some zhuzhing up, so they came up with this folding triangle, and it is perfection.
Granted, it’s very expensive perfection. To upgrade to it from the regular display, you’ve got to pay Bentley $6,820. That sounds like a lot, but when the total MSRP of the car is $369,825 (including destination), what’s seven grand? It’s a drop in the bucket.
Pricing be dammed, you need this rotating screen – the Forbidden Toblerone – if you’re buying a Continental GT (don’t be too sad, I’m not buying one either). Basically, as the Toblerone references would have you believe, the component has three sides. One is that 12.3-inch infotainment display. Another is just a blank panel for when the car is off. The third – which is my favorite – is a collection of three dials: temperature, direction and a lap timer. It’s not particularly useful, but they look absolutely fantastic in my opinion. You can toggle between the latter two using the “Screen” button directly below it. For the most part, I kept the gauges visible. The gauge cluster can handle most of what the center display does, anyway. If it ran Apple CarPlay, I’d probably never use the screen.
One of the big uses of the center screen, though, is the 360 camera system, parking sensors and backup camera. Even when you’ve got the screen turned off, it rotates almost immediately to display the camera when you get too close to an object in front of you or put the car in reverse So, no need to worry there, mate.
One more thing I really like about the Forbidden Toblerone is how it operates. It wasn’t enough to just have it spin on one fixed axis. That would be too simple – too boring. Instead, it moves in and out slightly to get out of the way of trim pieces, flips and moves back into place – flush with the rest of the dashboard. It’s really cool to see.
More automakers need to be doing stuff like this, especially as more and more people voice their (silly) displeasure of screens. It just adds a certain niceness to an otherwise still extremely nice interior.