Ladies and gentlemen, we present the ultimate car test: the most extreme motoring assessment yet devised, in a gruelling exercise that has never been tried before.

What is the most searching test of a car? Not its lap time at the Nürburgring, nor its pulling power outside the casino at Monte Carlo. And it’s not whether a supercar can be mollycoddled across vast distances in China – a stunt that Ferrari has adopted. You can forget, too, all your boring Top Trumps statistics; the ultimate test of a car is whether the Amish like it.

The Amish are the hardest to please consumers on earth. They are so difficult to satisfy, so hard a market to crack, that no manufacturer has yet succeeded in selling a car to one, and this is because cars are against their religion.

These are gentle folk who grow corn, make quilts and persist in speaking a form of German even though they live in America. Cars barely exist in their lives except as the dangerous devices of “the English”, as they call other Americans, who overtake them and leave them breathing dust and exhaust fumes as they go about their business in horsedrawn buggies at 20mph.

Of course, lots of things are against people’s religions: adultery, alcohol, avarice . . . and those are just the As. So the ultimate car test is to take a nice motor to some of the most devout people on earth to see whether they can be tempted. Stand by for an article in the best possible taste.

The Amish are people who don’t have mains electricity and don’t embrace any technology that might distract them from their families and God. Their objection to cars is the same as their objection to mains power. To connect to a public electricity supply would be to connect too closely with the world. The Amish prize self-sufficiency above a state of dependency (on petrol, for example). “Work is not something to get out of the way,” says Michael Franco, author of a book on the Amish. “Life is not meant to be hurried through, and change is not always a good thing.”

The Amish believe that if a person has a car he might spend his nights away from home instead of with his loved ones. Hmmm. So what car to tempt them with? We thought about taking along a Bugatti Veyron. It is the world’s fastest car, but it’s not that impressive to look at. And if you think about it, can someone who has never travelled by car tell the difference between 150mph and 250mph? The wider range of sub-200mph cars should be temptation enough.

But what? A Ferrari seems too red and brash. Even its sound is enough to scare someone not used to internal combustion engines. No, our car needs to be quiet, smooth, sedate. A Bentley – that could do it. Even those who think a supercar equates to a shrivelled ego tend to like the enormous Volkswagen that is a modern Bentley Continental GT. All that leather and walnut. And so we took one – all 2,385 beautifully crafted kilos of it – to Pennsylvania Dutch Country.

The Amish arrived here from Europe in 1710, fleeing persecution from the Catholic and Protestant churches. They and the Bentley have something in common. Outsiders imagine that Pennsylvania Dutch people were once Dutch, but Dutch is a corruption of Deutsch, or German. So the Bentley, which is a Volkswagen Phaeton under its rather lovely dark-green body, has the same heritage as they do.

That’s probably where the similarities stop. The Bentley is sybaritic, with one of the finest interiors yet seen. And so it should be, for £117,500. Its six-litre engine will propel it to 198mph, and it emits a colossal 410g of carbon dioxide per kilometre, even in normal motoring. Its party trick can be demonstrated on the winding roads of Amish country: you pitch the Bentley into a curve at indecent speed, and let the electronics work out how to get three tons to bend the laws of physics. It’s like cornering in a very capable house.

There’s plenty to entice a stranger, then. And lo! Here comes our first candidate, making brisk progress along a road through the fields in her horsedrawn buggy. She’s young, and like all Amish she is dressed conservatively. She qualifies for our challenge: she has a young boy with her, which means she is married and is a full member of the church. This has to give us an advantage. All mothers love their sons. And all small boys like Bentleys, surely?

Jay Clendenin, the photographer for this feature, stations himself in a field to photograph the buggy as it goes past the parked car, while I sit in the driver’s seat, wondering how to start a conversation with a stranger travelling at 20mph. At this point fate decides to help.

The Amish are not keen on photography. If you approach them with respect you might be rewarded with a smile or a wave. But because of a biblical passage they are very unrelaxed about cameras. As Jay stands in the field making graven images, the young Amish woman is distracted.

In the Bentley’s rear-view mirror I see the crash about to happen. The young woman is looking into the field and does not steer the buggy away from the parked Bentley. The horse takes avoiding action of its own and clears the car. But the buggy is wider than the horse and crashes into the beautiful dark-green paintwork, scuffing one panel and leaving a neat hole from the axle of the horsedrawn carriage, which stops. So that’s how you start a conversation with a young woman travelling at 20mph. She is unhurt, and seems innocently unaware that you don’t hit Bentleys without a big bill afterwards.

“Is there any damage?” she asks. Her name is Ruth King, and she is travelling 13 miles with her son Jack, to see her parents. I tell her not to worry about it, then, as quickly as I open my mouth to entice her to take a look inside the car or even try the driver’s seat, she cracks the reins and moves off, smiling. Nul points. Plus some explaining to do to Bentley.

For two more days Jay and I motor up and down Amish country, trying to meet people. I have a heavy cold and am depressed. “You’ve become so defeatist,” says Jay, and he’s right. It seems that the ultimate car test is going to end in failure.

These are the strictest of the strict, remember. The thing about these Anabaptists – that’s the technical term for Christians who believe in adult baptism – is that over the centuries they kept disagreeing about how rigorously to enforce their faith, and every time there was a dispute the Amish were on the stern side of the fence. In the 17th century, for example, the Mennonites began to take a mildly forgiving attitude towards individuals who violated a rule, where the Amish upheld the tradition of shunning them. So they broke away, and now they are here.

And then it happens. We encounter an Amish farmer on his way home, and offer him a lift, which he accepts. His hand goes instantly to cover his face when he sees Jay’s cameras on the back seat, and a surreal conversation follows. I drive a billionaire’s car along rural roads, trying to make friends with an austere front-seat passenger who has his hand covering his face.

Now I don’t want you to think that he is not a proper Amish fellow: they are allowed to accept lifts, just as some Amish may use mobile phones, provided there is a good reason for it and no threat to family life. The mobile will be used to conduct business, and will then be left outside the house so that it cannot interrupt family meals, prayer or conversation with visitors. To accept a lift has similar constraints.

Our farmer is a short, sweet man called Aaron, who sits swathed in the Bentley’s finest leather, red mud colouring his bare feet. Behind his hand you can glimpse a white beard, denoting that he is married. He tells me that he has nine children, and from the look of the hand I’d say he is in his late fifties. He has 76 acres of corn, alfalfa and dairy cows, and if we had not given him a lift he was going to walk the five miles home.

I tell him about the Bentley: “This car is capable of 198mph.” But why, queries the talking hand in the front passenger seat. “Why would anyone want to go that fast? That is a tremendous speed.” I explain to Aaron that in mainstream western culture people are competitive. And a wealthy man will derive satisfaction from having a car faster than yours.

“I understand what you are saying,” he says. We reach the final straight before his home.

It’s now or never. Throughout the journey Aaron has kept his hand over his face, but now, as I demonstrate what it feels like to accelerate from 0-60mph in 4.7sec, his hand comes away and he starts to laugh. The laugh subsides into a big smile. It isn’t the hysterical laugh of fear, I promise you. As the Bentley roars past fields where people work the land using horsedrawn equipment, Aaron is enjoying himself.

It is tempting to seduce him further. Would he like to take the wheel, perhaps? This is wicked, of course, and not very wise. What would Bentley say if I put the 552 horses of its Continental GT at the disposal of a father of nine accustomed to one horsepower? He declines, of course. But before he does he pauses. And in that second I can see a look that says, “Yes, it would be fun. It would be wrong, but it would certainly be fun.”

And that was all I needed. To you it might not seem like such a great achievement for a week’s work and a journey across the Atlantic and back. But any experiment, scientific or sociological, may be painstaking for small reward. Triumphs are all about context.

For the ultimate car test, it’s a pass: the man with the muddy feet was happy and had a great story to tell his wife.

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