Every car is an argument about what matters, and the Bugatti Veyron makes its case with 7993 cc quad-turbocharged Volkswagen W16 and Standard (Coupé), Grand Sport (Roadster): 1001 PS. Bugatti built from 2005 to 2015 — in the decade of stability control, dual-clutch gearboxes and the first serious hybrids. Jozef Kabaň drew it. The total made was 450.
The story
The Bugatti Veyron EB 16.4 is a mid-engine sports car designed and developed in Germany by the Volkswagen Group and Bugatti, and manufactured in Molsheim, France by French automobile manufacturer Bugatti. It was named after the racing driver Pierre Veyron. The original version has a top speed of 407 km/h (253 mph). It was named the 2000s Car of the Decade by the BBC television programme Top Gear. The standard Veyron also won Top Gear's Best Car Driven All Year award in 2005. The Super Sport version of the Veyron is one of the fastest street-legal production cars in the world, with a top speed of 431.072 km/h (267.856 mph). The Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse was the fastest roadster in the world, reaching an averaged top speed of 408.84 km/h (254.04 mph) in a test on 6 April 2013.
The production car speed record was later taken by another Bugatti, the Chiron, and then often changed hands for a while. The Veyron's chief designer was Hartmut Warkuß, with the exterior being designed by Jozef Kabaň of Volkswagen. Much of the engineering work was conducted under the guidance of chief technical officer Wolfgang Schreiber. The Veyron includes a sound system designed and built by Burmester Audiosysteme. Several special variants have been produced. In December 2010, Bugatti began offering prospective buyers the ability to customise exterior and interior colours by using the Veyron 16.4 Configurator application on the marque's official website. The Bugatti Veyron was discontinued in late 2014, but special edition models continued to be produced until 2015.
What is underneath
Power comes from 7993 cc quad-turbocharged Volkswagen W16; Standard (Coupé), Grand Sport (Roadster): 1001 PS is the published figure. It weighs 1838-1990 kg. Work it out per tonne and you get about 545 horsepower — hypercar territory, where the limiting factor is the tyre, not the engine. It shifts through a 7-speed Ricardo dual-clutch automatic. The layout matters: the engine sits behind the driver and ahead of the rear axle, which puts the mass in the middle of the car and is why mid-engined cars change direction the way they do. The wheelbase is 2710 mm. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Its place in the line
Its family tree is legible: it took over from the Bugatti EB 110; its successor was the Bugatti Chiron; assembly was at Alsace, Molsheim, France. Its contemporaries in the catalogue — the Nissan URGE, the Maserati MC12 — show what else the money bought that year. Nearby in the Bugatti catalogue sit the Bugatti 57 Galibier and the Bugatti 8-cylinder line.