In 1997, Ferdinand Piëch, chairman of the Volkswagen Group, was on a bullet train from Tokyo to Nagoya when he pulled out an envelope and started sketching an engine. By the time the train pulled in he had the rough outline of what would become the most consequential production car of the 21st century. Not bad for a two-hour commute.
The Bugatti Veyron was not supposed to exist. Before it arrived, the understood ceiling for a road car was somewhere around 600 horsepower and 320km/h. These were the numbers serious manufacturers chased and serious buyers accepted, the McLaren F1 a perfect example. Piëch looked at those numbers and found them unambitious.
He wanted 1,000 horsepower, 400km/h, and be comfortable enough to drive to dinner. His engineers told him some of what he was asking was physically impossible. He told them to keep working.
The Engine That Started as a Sketch
The brief was simple and completely unreasonable. One thousand horsepower, 400km/h top speed, usable as a daily driver. To get there Bugatti’s engineers essentially built two V8 engines and bolted them together into a W16, then strapped four turbochargers to it. The result was an 8.0-litre, 16-cylinder, quad-turbocharged engine producing 1,001 PS and 1,250Nm of torque. Sixty-four valves. Ten separate radiators to manage the heat it generated. A purpose-built seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox because nothing else in existence could handle what the engine was putting out.
Michelin spent five years developing tyres specifically for the car as no existing tyre could survive the forces generated at the speeds Piëch wanted. At full speed, 407km/h in the standard car, a set of tyres would last about 15 minutes before needing replacement which was not cheap at $42,000 per new set. The key to unlock that top speed had to be physically inserted into a separate slot in the floor, which also dropped the ride height, deployed the rear spoiler and closed the front diffuser flaps. You could only legally use it at approved test tracks. Almost nobody ever did, which did not stop people wanting the car.
VW Lost Money on Every Single One
Volkswagen Group began production in 2005 and sold 450 Veyrons over ten years at a starting price of roughly 1.25 million euros. That sounds like a lot of revenue, but it wasn’t enough, as the development cost alone ran to approximately 1.62 billion euros. The manufacturing cost of each individual car was estimated at around six million euros more than what it sold for. Volkswagen lost money on every single Veyron they made, by design, as a deliberate statement about what the brand was capable of. They knew this going to happen and yet the board approved it anyway.
Gordon Murray, who designed the McLaren F1 and is not known for being easily impressed, called the Veyron project “the most pointless exercise on the planet” before he drove one. After driving it he described it as “a huge achievement.” That reversal is probably the most accurate review the car ever received.
What It Actually Did
The standard Veyron hit 407km/h and 0 to 100km/h in 2.5 seconds when it launched in 2005. These were numbers that made every other production car look slow overnight, which they now were. In 2010 the Super Sport variant pushed that to 431km/h, setting the official production car speed record. The Grand Sport Vitesse, the open-top version, hit 408km/h with no roof, which remains the fastest roadster ever built.
What made these numbers more remarkable was what the car was like at normal speeds. It was incredibly comfortable, refined and quiet enough to hold a conversation. It had suspension that could adjust automatically to conditions, and great air conditioning. You could genuinely drive it to the shops or on the Nürburgring.
Bugatti had promised a car that was both the fastest and the most liveable and they delivered both, which nobody had managed before and most people had not believed possible.
The Veyron's Legacy
Production ended in 2015 with the last car, a Grand Sport Vitesse named La Finale. By then the Veyron had done what Piëch had intended by proving the point. Every hypercar manufacturer who came after it was working in its shadow, chasing numbers the Veyron had already defined. The Chiron replaced it in 2016 with 1,500hp and a 490km/h top speed and was itself eventually succeeded by the Tourbillon, which uses a V16 hybrid powertrain. The arms race the Veyron started has not stopped.
The name itself is a tribute to Pierre Veyron, a Bugatti development engineer and racing driver who, alongside Jean-Pierre Wimille, won the 1939 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Bugatti with almost no resources and a single car entry. EB in the full name EB 16.4 stands for Ettore Bugatti, the founder. The 16.4 refers to sixteen cylinders and four turbochargers. Everything about the car was deliberate, including what they chose to call it.