From the March/April 2026 issue of Car and Driver.
After I announced my purchase of a massively depreciated 2002 Bentley Arnage T [November/December 2025], readers responded with surprising enthusiasm and well wishes, if not exactly optimism for my success. The energy was that of a group of teens encouraging the boldest and dumbest among them to attempt an unlikely stunt: "What a good idea [for you to do]."
Much like hypothetical Kyle on his brother's Trek, I was smug at the top of the hill. Things were going just as I'd planned. I'd bought the Bentley as a summer beater, and I cruised through the hottest month of 2025 cocooned in icy air and hand-sewn upholstery. The one failure, the radiator hose, was quickly forgotten in the glamour that the Arnage brought to such mundane tasks as airport pickups and parts runs for other projects. True elegance is the heavy click of the door latch in a Harbor Freight parking lot and the cracking of necks as people try to figure out what important personage just exited a Bentley in a Harbor Freight parking lot.
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I should have taken heed of a conversation I had soon after the radiator hose. At a dinner, I spotted a dapper fellow in a Bentley hat and asked whether he owned any of the cars. He did—several. "I have an Arnage!" I told him. "But it's broken right now." Unsurprised, he responded, "Well, yeah."
Next up was a check-engine light right before the state-mandated smog inspection. It went out once its job of stymieing my registration was complete, then gave way to a "throttle control" warning that put the car in limp mode and threw a pending mass-airflow-sensor code. That light soon had company from pretty much every warning available. A full house of blinking warnings is discouraging, but not nearly as much as a complete blackout. No lights at all. No gauges. No power to the diagnostic port, which is where any modern mechanic would turn to figure out why there were no lights or gauges.
Someday, when my husband, Tom, and I are very old, I'll turn to him and say, "Honey, do you remember when you found the burned-out alarm module in the wheel well of the Bentley using only paper clips and a test light?" He'll look up at me from under the used luxury shuttlecraft I just bought and say, "Can you hold the flashlight steady?"
Anyhow, that's what it was, or what some of it was. Tom traced the dead wires back to a 7.5-amp fuse in a 5-amp spot and, after replacing it with a 5-amp that immediately blew, followed that to the corroded remains of the built-in security system. Once that was removed, the emergency flashers turned on and kept blinking until the battery died. It's a feature, not a bug.
To convince the car it wasn't stolen, I ordered a replacement siren box ($500) from U.K.-based parts house Flying Spares, solving the battery drain and the fuse problem. That left us with the throttle-control issue. Returning to paper clips and a multimeter, we think we've tracked down the problem to an ECU—a multithousand-dollar item, but we've got our favorite NASA-engineer nephew checking the computer internals. I'm hoping he can fix it, or at least confirm that it's broken before I spend nearly half this car's value on a new unit.
All of this was complicated by the fact that Bentley doesn't offer much support for older models. That's probably because anyone working on their own Bentley is unlikely to buy a new Bentley anytime soon.
My reference material for a 2002 Arnage comes in the form of a USB drive that can somehow only be read by a PC set to think it's February 2014. My ancient college laptop eventually manages to open the files, which offer some advice for parts disassembly but no wiring diagrams. All of that, Bentley assumes, would be handled by the specialty Bentley scan tool available to Bentley technicians.
There aren't a ton of Bentley technicians, and few of them are working on 25-year-old Arnages, so there's not much repair information floating around the internet. There are other Arnage owners, and while they are an excellent source of part numbers and emotional support, each Arnage seems broken in its own unique way, meaning my compatriots can do little more than sympathize with my issues.
Chasing the Arnage's gremlins is more of a challenge than I expected, yet I have no regrets. When we do finally solve them, I'll feel like we carved Mount Rushmore with a hand chisel. Some may think I'm Icarus, flying too close to the sun, but I think I'm Theseus, still in the labyrinth, confident I can slay the beast.
Like a sleeper agent activated late in the game, Elana Scherr didn’t know her calling at a young age. Like many girls, she planned to be a vet-astronaut-artist, and came closest to that last one by attending UCLA art school. She painted images of cars, but did not own one. Elana reluctantly got a driver’s license at age 21 and discovered that she not only loved cars and wanted to drive them, but that other people loved cars and wanted to read about them, which meant somebody had to write about them. Since receiving activation codes, Elana has written for numerous car magazines and websites, covering classics, car culture, technology, motorsports, and new-car reviews. In 2020, she received a Best Feature award from the Motor Press Guild for the C/D story "A Drive through Classic Americana in a Polestar 2." In 2023, her Car and Driver feature story "In Washington, D.C.'s Secret Carpool Cabal, It's a Daily Slug Fest" was awarded 1st place in the 16th Annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club.