Bugatti Type 18

Among the 201 Bugatti entries in the MotorJury library, the Bugatti Type 18 holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1912. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Bugatti Type 18 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1910s were the decade the automobile became an industry — Ford's moving assembly line cut the price of motoring by an order of magnitude and forced every rival to industrialise or vanish. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Lion-Peugeot Lion-Peugeot Type V4C3, the Laurin & Klement Laurin & Klement Excelsior, the Audi AG Audi Type C — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Bugatti Type 18 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 5027 cc Straight-4; quoted output is 100 bhp / maximum r.p.m. 2,400 / UK tax rating 24.8 h.p.; kerb weight is recorded at 2750 lb; drive goes through four-speed sliding-pinion gearbox / final drive by side chains; the layout is platform =. Worked together, those figures give roughly 36 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Bugatti story

Within Bugatti's own catalogue the Bugatti Type 18 sits alongside the Bugatti 57 Galibier, the Bugatti 8-cylinder line, the Bugatti Centodieci, the Bugatti Type 13. The record names the successor = as its predecessor and the class = as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to sp = uk. Assembly is recorded at Germany: Molsheim, Alsace.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Bugatti Type 18 was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.