Warning about soft close door system on Bentley Continental

This is a warning to all owners of the Bentley Continental. The Bentley Continental features a “Soft Close” Power Latching Door System that engages the door just before it closes and uses powerful electric motors to pull the door shut and latch it automatically. This system does not appear to have a safety built into it to stop the power latching motor system from closing the door when a hand or finger is in the way. My wife’s Bentley crushed her thumb flatter than a pancake when the soft close power latching door system closed the door on it. To make matters worse, the door jammed and she was unable to open the door while her thumb was crushed in the door for several minutes. The pain was so unbearable that she eventually passed out. Luckily a man came to her rescue and opened the door. The man that opened the door stated that it took both his hands and all his strength to open the door. My wife was taken to the hospital in an ambulance and held for observation as she is 62 years old and her blood pressure was very high and she was in a state of shock not to mention the severe damage to her thumb. The doctors had to drill holes in her thumb to release the pressure and place a splint on it because it was shattered. My wife was in pain for many months after the accident, and her thumb is permanently deformed. However we feel lucky that she didn’t have a heart attack and die that day due to the extreme physical stress of the situation. Please be careful with your hands and fingers around the doors on the Bentley Continental when they shut, and be especially careful around small children so that they don’t get their hands crushed in the doors.

Thank you guys. We are really worried about small children on something like this. I tried carrots and all kinds of stuff and the door just closes on them chopping them in half. When our grandson is around the car we are extra careful. As some have stated here, our S Class Mercedes had the same feature, but maybe they have some kind of safety built in it, I don't know. If this thing did that to my wife's hand, I don't want to think about what it could do to a child's hand.

Yep, that’s the internet today, lots of trolls mixed in with real people. Nearly all of us have smashed a finger or toe in a door and quickly removed it and later we lost a nail which is no big deal. A better way to envision what this did to my wife would be to put your thumb into a vice and have someone else squish it down to less than ½ the normal thickness until your hear the bones crush, and then leave it there being crushed for 5 minutes. It's one thing to smash your finger for a couple seconds; it's another to crush it to the point of breaking the bones for 5 whole minutes straight. In the beginning the doctors told us that she might not ever be able to use her thumb again, but we got lucky as she did regain most of the use of her thumb. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to think what could happen to a 5 year old child that gets their whole hand caught in the door and they don’t get lucky. We did not release this information to get sympathy from strangers or more money out of Bentley, we aren’t broke, and any amount we might get isn’t earth shattering. You don’t get millions for breaking your thumb. This is simply about the idea that if we said nothing and someone else was to get hurt or God forbid got hurt worse that would be irresponsible on our part. Our main concern is children; if this had happened to my 3 year old grandson I would be beyond discussion. Someone needs to look into this before someone really gets hurt.

All of Bentley's cars come standard with it; you can't buy their car without it. We also had it in a couple cars before this, the Mercedes 600S and 500S. So, we didn't think anything of it. We just assumed there was some kind of safety feature like there is in minivan doors. We even asked Bentley if their newest cars (this year’s models) had a safety feature to stop the door from "soft latching" when something was in the way, and they said no. I think it's unbelievable in this day and age. Someone at some point is going to get really hurt.