Comparison: 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost vs 2010 Bentley CFS Speed vs 2010 Aston Martin Rapide

On one level, this is a completely pointless comparison. You see, the folks with the Benjamins to splurge on the $308,350 Rolls-Royce Ghost we show here, or the $226,485 Bentley Continental Flying Spur Speed and $209,500 Aston Martin Rapide that accompany it, are unlikely to sweat the mundane details the rest of us do when choosing between a Ford or a Chevy, or a Honda or a Toyota. Stuff like gas mileage and resale values and whether one might be a couple tenths quicker to 60 than the other are mostly irrelevant.

Even the price difference between the Rolls and the Aston -- money that will buy you a house in many parts of America -- is of little consequence. The people who buy these things usually own six or seven other cars; opening their garage doors is like opening a closet: "Hmmm...it's nice and sunny. Think I'll take the Lamborghini convertible today."

Yet it's an intriguing matchup, all the same. All three cars areuber-luxury four doors powered by 12-cylinder engines of roughly 6.0 liters or more. All three wear aristocratic nameplates and carefully trade on their storied pasts to command price tags that defy logic and common sense. All three ooze "Rule Britannia" to their bootstraps, yet were designed and developed by engineering teams headed by...Germans. The links that bind these three cars together are deeper and more profound than the differences that divide them.

The Ghost is the first small Rolls-Royce launched since the 1949 Silver Dawn, though "small" is a relative term: at 212.6 inches, it's still 4.3 inches longer overall than the not insubstantial Bentley CFS Speed and boasts a 9.0-inch-longer wheelbase. The Ghost is an imperiously elegant car: restrained and tasteful, but with a powerful presence on the road. The front axle is pushed forward and the cabin set back, delivering perfect proportions, and it has the high-nose, low-tail stance characteristic of classic British luxury cars. The Ghost sweeps around a circular driveway like a Riva Aquarama carving graceful turns on Lake Como.

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The Ghost dwarfs the Aston Martin Rapide, though at 197.6 inches long, and with a 117.7-inch wheelbase, the Aston is still bigger than a Cadillac STS. The lithe, sensuous, impossibly gorgeous Rapide is a near-perfect replica of the concept that all but stole the 2006 Detroit show, and the way the DB9 coupe's curves have been artfully tugged and teased over a longer wheelbase and around four doors is truly breathtaking. Car-savvy Angelinos nearly drove off the road while vying for a closer look every time we hit the freeway.

Next to the Ghost and the Rapide, the CFS Speed looks a little frumpy. It's partly familiarity, as the Continental Flying Spur has been on the road almost five years, and parts of L.A. are awash with the things. But equally, there's no disguising the VW Group architecture on which it's built. If the superbly articulated Rolls-Royce Ghost has the quintessential British luxury-car design vocabulary just right, the Bentley, with its stubby hood and short front fenders, plus its long cabin and slightly odd C-pillar, has it all wrong. In terms of proportion and stance, it looks more middle European than resolutely British.

That's not to say we don't like it, however. Any company that names its performance models Speed is just fine by us, especially when it's not just marketing hype. With its 6.0-liter, twin-turbo W-12 engine tuned to deliver 48 more horses and 74 pound-feet than the regular Continental Flying Spur (it also gets retuned suspension, and Pirelli PZero tires on 20-inch rims), the CFS Speed is a leather-lined, ground-based intercontinental ballistic missile that will hit a genuine 200 mph on the autobahn without breaking a sweat. Even the Aston Martin will reach only 188 mph, while the Rolls is restricted to a dignified 155.

But while the 600-horse Bentley's sheer, um,speedis astonishing, its herculean powertrain is not the best of this bunch. That honor goes to the Ghost's 563-horsepower, 6.6-liter, direct-injection, twin-turbo V-12, which drives the rear wheels through the only eight-speed automatic transmission in this trio. With 575 pound-feet of torque on tap at just 1500 rpm -- 22 pound-feet more than the Bentley, available 200 rpm sooner -- and better gearing, the BMW-developed engine delivers satiny Saturn V thrust the moment you caress the gas pedal. This 5381-pound limo will accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 4.3 seconds, a tenth slower than the 101-pound-heavier AWD Bentley, but obliterates that deficit over the quarter mile, crossing the line two-tenths sooner than the CFS and carrying 6 mph more speed. We're talking 12.7 seconds at 112.9 mph with little more than a polite murmur from under the hood.

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Both the Rolls and the Bentley leave the sports car of this bunch gasping in their wake. Producing 470 horses at 6000 rpm, the Aston Martin Rapide's naturally aspirated 5.9-liter V-12 is hardly a weakling, but it feels decidedly undernourished in this company, delivering a 0-to-60-mph time of 4.7 seconds, and a 13.2-second quarter mile. The issue is the torque curve: Without a couple of turbos force-feeding it, the Aston engine displays the typical peakiness of a V-12, with its maximum 443 pound-feet of torque not available until a dizzy 5000 rpm. A six-speed automatic transmission that has an annoying hole between second and third gears, and is not as crisply calibrated as the one in the Bentley, doesn't help. The Rapide feels lethargic unless you keep the tranny in sport mode around town or fan the paddle shifters to maintain momentum along a winding canyon road.

Apart from pronounced tire roar at highway speeds, the Aston's chassis strikes an unexpectedly competent balance between sports car and luxury sedan, however. Leave the shocks set in normal mode, and the Rapide rides choppy freeways surprisingly smoothly and won't beat you up on acned city streets. Switch to sport mode, and the Rapide amps up the dialogue between driver and road surface, though it never gets intrusive or uncomfortable. In the twisties, the Rapide feels like a DB9 on Novocaine; though the steering is still tactile and linear, the longer wheelbase has clearly damped its reflexes. It's best to brake hard and wash off speed before you turn in, then wait for the apex before getting on the gas. Rush things, and the front end will invariably push wide. Get it right, and the Rapide will -- if you have the stability control switched off -- exit the turn in a beautifully controlled powerslide.

On its home turf in Sussex, England, the Ghost went down the road like silk underwear down a supermodel's leg. But here in the colonies, on roads littered with lateral bumps -- freeway section joins, spoon drains -- as well as potholes and other imperfections, the suspension constantly transmits a rubbery rumba of shudders back through the body structure that even the passengers notice. And while that truly epic powertrain provides an effortless surge away from the lights or onto the freeway, you can find yourself arriving at corners on an empty winding two-lane faster than you bargained for. Fortunately the brakes are outstanding, because getting the Ghost to change direction in a hurry is a bit like making an elephant tap dance. This might be the "small" Rolls-Royce, but it feels strangely less wieldy than the bigger Phantom. Part of the problem, we suspect, could be the Goodyear EMT run-flat tires, which feel stiff in the sidewalls.

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Like their counterparts at Porsche, the Bentley chassis engineers seem determined to build a car that defies the laws of physics. Setting the suspension in Comfort or Normal modes caramel coats the road impacts from the sports-oriented tires without diluting the precision of their responses. Sport mode makes the ride noticeably busier, and generates some noise through the steering during hard cornering, but keeps the body nicely tied down. The Bentley tracks like a Bullet Train on the freeway, even in gusty crosswinds that had the Rolls driver dialing constant corrections back through the steering wheel. And its behavior on a winding two-lane is almost beyond rational explanation -- you simply cannot believe a car this big, this heavy, can be this good to drive.

How good? Let's just say you have to drive the wheels off the Aston Martin to stay with the big Bentley. True, the CFS works its front tires very hard, and the AWD layout robs the steering of some clarity. But after an exhilaratingly fast run along a canyon road, you get out of the CFS Speed shaking your head and grinning like a loon at the sheer implausibility of what you've just done.

All three cars have visually stunning interiors. The Rolls and the Bentley are everything you expect, as tastefully tailored and traditionally detailed as a Savile Row suit. The Ghost has the best back seat (our tester had the optional "lounge seat" configuration, a $6000 option), but it's the Bentley that's the best built, with superb attention to materials throughout. The Rapide eschews the traditional British wood, leather, and bright chrome combo for more modern materials and a concept-car ambience. However, the Aston's ergonomics are messy -- try and find the fuel filler release without consulting the manual, for example -- and for all the hype, the rear seats are barely useable for anyone over 12 years old. The typical Rapide customer's friends will be too old and inflexible to contort themselves into the back seat for even a short ride to the restaurant.

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It probably doesn't matter much what we think about these three cars. The guy who reaches for his AmEx Centurion Card to buy an Aston Martin Rapide won't care that the rear seats are really suitable only for children, that the ergonomics are hit-and-miss, and that there's no room for his Louis Vuitton luggage. He won't care that the Aston feels a little fragile, its interior kvetching over less-than-perfect road surfaces, or that the prehistoric sat-nav seems an afterthought. All he'll care about is that he's driving the most beautiful four-door in the world, and that everyone is noticing.

The guy who raids his mad-money account in the Cayman Islands to buy a Rolls-Royce Ghost won't mind that this is a car best driven like an old Buick Roadmaster. He probably won't mind the disappointing drift away from authentic Rolls-Royce values -- that the optional silver hood is paint rather than polished aluminum as on the Phantoms, that the iconic eyeball vents are now plastic instead of chrome-plated brass, that the ignition key is mostly a lightweight lump of plastic (though he might notice if the chrome plating started to peel off it as it did on our test car's key, which, along with the unsightly bubbles in the black vinyl applique on the lower part of the front fascia, was a worrying quality lapse in a car with a base price of $246,700). He won't mind because he's just buying the statement that Spirit of Ecstasy makes when he pulls into the forecourt of the Beverly Hills Hotel and the valet guys fall all over themselves to leave it parked out front.

And the Bentley guy? The Bentley guy doesn't have a care in the world. Because if he wants a beautifully built, ultra-exclusive,uber-luxury limo, he's got one. And if he wants a 200-mph four-door sports car, he's got one of those too.

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