The 2014 Bentley Flying Spur W12 arrived at my door the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, on the mistaken assumption that I’d been invited to the Kim-Kanye nuptials. Sadly, all I had going on was my regular appointed weekend rounds, so I donned my best tuxedo t-shirt and headed out to tackle my to-do list.

We live in the crappiest house in a nice suburb 40 minutes west of Boston. Like many a one-percenter, I have a swimming pool, but unlike the Koch Brothers of the world, I have to clean mine myself. After the worst winter in recent memory, I lifted the enormous blue tarp off of it and glumly looked at a body of water as green as the cash in Warren Buffett’s mattress. I headed off to Village Pool to buy about 25 gallons of shock.

The first really impressive thing about the Bentley is the incredible size of the trunk. I’ve driven somewhere around 50 new cars a year for the last 15 years and I can’t remember a vehicle with such an enormous boot. Where your Koch Brothers would fill that cavernous maw with golf bags or the souls of union workers, I was shocked to learn that I could haul at least seven five-gallon containers before I reached the maximum 16.6 cubic feet.

Next up on the agenda was shuttling a VIP. My five-year-old son Harry lives a life very much like that of a well-heeled billionaire. He arises at dawn and has food and drink prepared, has a butler (read: his mother) toilet him and prepare his mid-day meal. His care and feeding runs at a rate somewhat similar to that of the Sultan of Brunei. His demand this Saturday was a new Lego book so I chauffeured him to the Barnes & Noble where I laid out 25 clams for the Lego Star Wars Dictionary.

On the way, Prince Harry had his way with the buttons on the side of the Flying Spur’s rear seats. Along with the expected recline, heat and cooling features, he was overjoyed with the massage function that operated like a particularly expensive chair at Brookstone. He also appreciated the fold-down armrest that provided a significant buffer between him and his 10-year-old sister.

I could’ve saved twenty-five bucks if the Library had been open Saturday morning.

Early the next morning, I had a chance to sample the Flying Spur W12’s long legs on a trip to New Hampshire. Here’s the interesting thing you learn about the Flying Spur when you compare it to those 50 other cars you drove over the course of a year: a lot of cars — some which cost not much more than a tenth of the Flying Spur’s $230,000 price tag — offer a lot of the same creature comforts inside. Heated and cooled seats: Check. Hand-stitched leather: Check. Thick pile carpeting: Yep. A killer audio system: Got it. What none of those cars feature, though, is a 616hp, twin-turbocharged W12, capable of rocketing 5,445 pounds of exclusive gentleman’s club to 60 miles an hour in 4.3 seconds.

At one point over the weekend, somebody asked me what its maximum speed was. I took an educated guess at 175. Wrong. It’s electronically limited to 200mph. Two. Hundred. Miles. An. Hour. Not long ago, that was the domain of some of the world’s most exclusive sports cars. Now you can blast this squared-off aluminum bus up there and sip a cup of tea while you’re at it.

About the only thing I was a little disappointed with was the ride quality. I was hoping for the kind of ride that Steve Allen used to get while playing a keyboard in the back of a Continental, but alas, if you’re building a car capable of 200 miles per hour, and placing a set of four enormous 21-inch alloy wheels at the corner, ride quality is going to suffer a bit.  On the back roads of New England, which have admittedly suffered through a horrible winter this year, the ride could be a little harsh. Tip into the throttle on an on-ramp, though, and the ride smooths out considerably.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, if you were buying the kind of sedan the have-nots tend to drive, car companies went miles out of their way to make you feel like a cheapskate. As late as the mid-2000s, the only interior colors available were “Naval Infirmary Gray” and “Artificial Limb Beige,” and if you really loaded up the option list, you might get four speakers.

Today, 90 percent of the entertainment technology on the Bentley Flying Spur comes in a Buick LaCrosse, and frankly, there are places where Buick does it better. The Bentley’s Audi-sourced audio interface, for example, takes a long time to configure itself on startup, something that lesser cars have eliminated almost entirely.

What you get for $230,000 in the Bentley that you don’t get in a new Buick, though, is the recognition that you are, in fact, driving a Bentley. Every car that passed on the highway contained a passenger that craned his neck to see who was driving it. Parking it anywhere from the Job Lot to Mexico City Taqueria was an event, resulting in sidelong glances, double-takes and full-on open-mouthed stares.

I’ve driven a lot of Buicks and never had that reaction.