Bentley 8 Litre

Among the 62 Bentley entries in the MotorJury library, the Bentley 8 Litre holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1930. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Bentley 8 Litre properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1930s were the streamline decade, when aerodynamics entered body design, independent suspension spread, and grand-prix engineering began flowing into road cars even as the Depression thinned the industry. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Bugatti Bugatti type 46 roadster, the AB Volvo Volvo TR670 Series, the Buick Buick Super — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Bentley 8 Litre reads like this: the record lists its engine as SOHC 8 L I6; quoted output is 220 bhp @3,300rpm / Tax rating 44.9 hp (Tax horsepower#Britain / RAC Rating); kerb weight is recorded at 2.5 tonnes (5500 lb.) or more, depending on coachwork; drive goes through Manual gearbox, 4-speeds and reverse / Single-dry-plate clutch / Hypoid bevel final drive; the layout is FR layout. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Bentley story

Within Bentley's own catalogue the Bentley 8 Litre sits alongside the Bentley 3 Litre, the Bentley 3.5 Litre, the Bentley 4 Litre, the Bentley 4¼ Litre. Design is credited to W. O. Bentley. Assembly is recorded at United Kingdom: Cricklewood, London.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Bentley 8 Litre was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.