Man bought Mat Armstrong's Continental GT for just $20 after Bentley delivered shock verdict on his rebuild

Somebody was able to buy a Bentley Continental GT from Mat Armstrong for just $20.

On the face of it, $20 for a luxury coupe sounds like the deal of the century.

But when it comes to certain things, a $20 Bentley is exactly the same as a $200,000 Bentley.

And Armstrong had to find out the hard way.

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Why Armstrong gave his Bentley Continental GT away for just $20

A while back, Mat Armstrong bought a first-gen Bentley Continental GT for about $13,000, which isn’t bad for a vehicle that cost about $200,000 when it was new.

The problem was that this Continental GT was a nightmare to live with, mostly because it had 100 minor issues and one major one.

That’s not hyperbole, by the way.

Armstrong took it to Bentley for a service, and they literally found 100+ things wrong with it.

But, as he explained in a video posted on his YouTube channel, he simply wanted to drive it to Monaco, which he did, and after that, he decided to give the car away in a competition for his subscribers.

In the end, one of them won it for just $20.

Not a bad deal.

The problem with buying used luxury cars

British TV presenter James May once said that when you buy a used luxury car, you should bear in mind that the ‘used’ part matters more than the ‘luxury’ part.

“Most people think: ‘It may be old, but it’s still a Bentley’, but it’s the other way around. As in, it may be a Bentley, but it’s old,” he once wrote in a newspaper column.

The old adage that ‘if you can’t afford maintenance and fuel, you can’t afford the car’, applies to an old Bentley in the same way it applies to a new Bentley.

That’s what’s driving the price of some luxury vehicles down.

The Range Rover L322 is probably the best example we can think of.

It’s very cheap because it’s famously unreliable.

This is why old L322s sometimes end up being scrapped in large graveyards or old barns.

And it’s also the reason you can sometimes find examples in good condition for a few hundred dollars.

Not only that, it really depends on what’s broken, because if the thing that’s broken is essential, it might also cause something else to break: the owner’s bank.

Even seemingly routine maintenance checks and services might end up costing a fortune.