Car Sangarz

I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only enthusiast who saves old magazines.  While cleaning out some old junk, I came across the January 2000 edition of Road & Track.  The cover story is 100 Best Cars of 100 Years.  I assume this is like the Wikipedia of its day to an impressionable fourteen year old. Having said that, the most striking thing about the issue is the Ampersand column which has a short blurb about the Bugatti Veyron Concept.

Bugatti Veyron Concept

Now, we all know that the Bugatti Veyron in production form sports a 8.0 liter quad-turbo W16 which is mated to a 7-speed dual clutch transmission.  The 1001 horsepower from that massive power plant gets to the ground through all four contact patches.  This allows for some tenacious grip and a 0-60 time of 2.5 seconds.  However, this was not the original vision for the mightiest of supercars.

Bugatti Veyron courtesy of vivagoal.com

Having pictures of both the production car and the concept for comparison shows that the production car seems to have gone through the gestation period pretty much intact.  Repeated reports of crashed test mules with bad aerodynamics tell a different story though.  Minute details like a more upright grill and a more bulbous front end seem to be the minor changes.  However,without the aid of a wind tunnel and an aerodynamicist, I'd be hard-pressed to tell any other differences.

Taking a peak under the hood would reveal a major difference.  The Volkswagen group had originally planned on using a 6.3 liter W18 for motivation.  This sounds like an extraordinary bit of engineering.  That is, until that 20/20 hindsight thing kicks in.  That W18 would push out around 555 horsepower.  This doesn't sound like much now considering the 6.3 liter V8 from the boys over at AMG develops 518 horsepower and a spleen-rupturing amount of torque which can be had at a tenth of the price of the Veyron.  It can be assumed that the Vee-dub planners saw the writing on the wall when the Lamborghini Murcielago (also under the VW umbrella) came out in 2001 with a 572 horsepower 6.2 liter V12.

It's refreshing to see that concept cars can make it to production with little change to the jaw-dropping sheet metal that originally made us wade through the car show crowds.  In addition, the ability to be fluid with engineering ideas and execution has allowed the Veyron to rewrite every performance record.  I hope my grandchildren will have the same kind of wonder that made me keep that issue of Road & Track because they'll probably be reading about the Veyron in that January 3000 issue of the 100 Best Cars of 100 Years.



Please let us know how you liked this article and if we should continue with a segment pertaining to concept cars and their production versions.

To start, Bugatti Veyron is a noun.

From there, things are going to get a bit complicated.. Or, dare I, things get a bit nonsensical.

Bugatti Veyron Gran Sport

We begin describing the Bugatti with numbers. Let's get started with the price first, something you should all feel more comfortable with understanding. It is a cool $170,576.90.

Wait, something isn't right... Oh no! I'm sorry, how embarrassing-- I accidentally moved it to the wrong decimal place. The starting price for a Bugatti Veyron is, in fact:

I repeat, One Million Seven Hundred and Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty Nine US Dollars. And get this, the company is still losing money for every car sold.

That's not all. The latest special edition Veyron Super Sport is said to be, according to New York Time's Wheels column writer, John Pearley Huffman (I did not make any of this up), priced at $2.5 MILLION!!!!!!! I'll give you a moment to let that settle in.

But it's true, isn't it? You should always get what you pay for.  So what's so special about this car, then, that it has the audacity to charge a price that is even greater than the stimulus amount granted to the schools of Orange County, California?

The first question we should ask when it comes to sports cars like the Bugatti is, "How fast does it go?"

We know it's more than 250mph, but how much is that really? The Veyron can out-accelerate a cheetah to 60mph, reach a higher top speed than a Boeing AH-64 Apache Gunship Helicopter used by our Navy and, in a very interesting 2-mile drag race, it is also a very competent adversary against the British Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon.




I mean seriously, a W16 cylinder quadturbo engine?! When I first heard of those numbers, i nearly crapped my pants. The Veyron would crap itself too if it didn't have ten radiators, only four of which are for the engine itself, to cool off.

No, she is not a midget nor is this photoshopped. Just accept that everything about this car is staggering and completely defies logic.

In spite of all the logic that it defies, we see that this car does exist for a purpose. The Veyron exists to be the fastest, most powerful, and most expensive production automobile in history. When the just-as-ugly Ultimate Aero SSC TT 123ABC decided to challenge the seat for top speed king, Bugatti Veyron answered back by doing what it does best, introducing the Veyron Supersport. It's even faster, even more powerful, even more ludicrous and twice as expensive as the original.

In the last episode of Top Gear (half of you readers probably saw it before I had a chance to), presenter James May gave it a go in the Veyron SS. Upon hitting the magic number, attaining the Veyron SS' terminal velocity of 417.9 kph (259.7 mph), Bugatti sent their factory test driver to take the car out again to do two runs, one at each direction of their oval test track, to average a top speed of 267mph. Now just to be clear, that's a total of three maximum speed runs in a span of one afternoon and this car just kept on going.

But I hate them for it.


On one hand, I am more than impressed by the monumental engineering. The undertaking of such a vehicle is immense and in car terms, comparable to a Saturn V rocket or CERN Large Hadron Collider project. Unfortunately, on the other hand, I feel like all this marvel is always going to be in the hands of people that least deserve it:

Car-Scrapyards: used car parts
presents

Bugatti Galibier

Bugatti is celebrating its 100th birthday this year, and what's better than a brand new concept to celebrate such an anniversary? The legendary marque has revealed extensive details about the Galibier. A successor of the €1-million Veyron, the Bugatti Galibier is "intended to be the most exclusive, elegant and powerful four-door automobile in the world".

The Bugatti Galibier is built with a carbonfibre body while the wings and doors are in polished aluminum. This gives the car a vintage look that I find very appealing. As you can see on the picture above, the bonnet opens in a very strange way.

Yet we can't help thinking that the Bugatti Galibier looks a lot like the recent Porsche Panamera. The make will decide whether this concept will go into production in 2010.