Start with what the Bentley Eight is: a 4-door saloon with 6.75 L Rolls-Royce V8, built from 1984 to 1992, in the age of turbocharging and the first electronic engine management. What it meant takes a little longer.
The story
The Bentley Eight was Bentley's "entry-level" offering from 1984 until 1992. Distinguished mainly by a wire-mesh grille radiator instead of vertical slats, the Eight also had somewhat less equipment than the similar Mulsanne on which it was based.
This brought the introductory price to under the psychologically important £50,000 mark at the time of introduction, £6,000 less than the Mulsanne. A firmer suspension offered slight handling improvements. The Eight was so popular that sales expanded from the original UK market to Europe and the United States.
What is underneath
The engine is 6.75 L Rolls-Royce V8. On the scales it comes to 2320.2 kg. Drive goes through a 4-sp 4L80-E automatic. The layout matters: a front engine drives the rear wheels, the classic proportion — long bonnet, cabin set back — that most people picture when they picture a sports saloon or a grand tourer. The wheelbase is 3061 mm. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Its place in the line
In the Bentley line-up the Bentley Eight has a clear place: it replaced the none; it handed the line to the none / Bentley Brooklands (successor of Mulsanne S) / Bentley Flying Spur (later, much cheaper); the factory was Crewe (Bentley Crewe), United Kingdom. The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the Renault Espace, the Ferrari Testarossa, the Toyota MR2. Nearby in the Bentley catalogue sit the Armoured Arnage and the Bentley 3 Litre.
Owning one today
MotorJury scores cars on the United States complaint and recall record, and the Bentley Eight has none: too old, too rare, or never sold there. Its value today is a collector's question, decided by provenance and condition rather than by a class average.