One way to describe what this car does -- the essence of this svelte piece of rolling thunder -- is to tell you what it feels like when Jens Schulenburg, Bugatti's master engineer, brings the beast to a dead stop on a flat stretch of deserted highway in Napa County, keeps his foot on the brake, and then says, "I think we now try the launch control." He punches a button -- yes, it is called "launch control" -- and releases the brake and slams the gas pedal to the floor.
Wham! There is a noise right behind our heads (it's a mid-engined car) that sounds like a jet plane taking off, a loud and ferocious whirring of pistons, valves, crankshaft, all blending together as the 8-liter (488 cubic inches), 16-cylinder "W-16" engine (that's two V8s sandwiched together), with four turbochargers helping us along, unleashes its 1,001 horsepower and the car literally rockets down the road. Zero to 60 comes up in less than three seconds; zero to 100 in about five seconds.
When the car goes over 100 miles an hour, the two side windows automatically go up, the more to help with the aerodynamics. At 137 miles an hour, a rear-mounted wing that applies hundreds of pounds of down force, elevates itself and the car automatically drops from four inches off the ground to three inches off the ground. By this time, I am pinned to the seat back. I try to move forward, but that's futile.
Then, just as suddenly, we're back to about 60 miles an hour, the countryside lazily flowing by -- it feels so slow! -- and the Bugatti is just another gentle, docile sports car lolling about a fine country road on a sunny afternoon with the top down.
This car is outrageous. It's insane. Everything about it is permeated with the extremes of man's addiction to cars, fast cars, superfast cars. But it multiplies everything you know about super cars by a factor of 10 -- by price alone, if nothing else. Consider the fast cars of the world, the top drawer, rarefied world of desirable objets -- Ferrari, Aston Martin, Maserati, Lamborghini, Bentley, Rolls Royce. They all graze in that pasture of $100,000 to maybe $400,000, give or take.
The Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport has a pasture all to itself -- it retails for about $2.1 million, including sales tax and delivery.
So how did this all come about? Why was this car even considered?
More than 10 years ago, Volkswagen Group, a rich company that has its bread-and-butter cars -- Volkswagens, SEATs, Skodas and the like -- bought Bugatti. The fabled auto company, founded by Ettore Bugatti in 1909 in Molsheim, a town in Germany in a region that later became part of France, had a duality of cars -- famous race cars, such as the Type 35, and equally famous touring cars, the best known of which is probably the Royale. Only seven of these monsters (they had an 898-cubic-inch straight-8 engine) are known to exist. (The late Nevada casino magnate, William Harrah, had two of them in his collection of 1,450 cars.)
During the 1920s and 1930s, Bugatti won Grand Prix after Grand Prix, but the company went into a decline during and after World War II. Bugatti died in 1947 and the firm saw a series of owners before its purchase by VW in 1998.
According to John Hill, Bugatti's marketing manager for "The Americas," this is how the Veyron came about: Dr. Ferdinand Piech, then chairman and CEO of Volkswagen Group -- he's the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche and a veteran Car Guy (he worked on race car development at Porsche)-- called a meeting and told his engineers that he wanted them to build a new Bugatti and here are the design criteria:
It must have 1,000 horsepower. It must do zero to 62 mph in less than three seconds. It must have a top speed of 406 kilometers an hour (252 mph). Oh, and one other thing: I must be able to drive it to the opera and not be embarrassed -- it's got to be the real thing, luxurywise.
Oui, mon general. Bien entendu.
So they got to work and came up with a car that bettered the boss' wishes by one -- it has 1,001 horses and it goes 407 kph (253 mph).
At first, there was the Veyron coupe, which bowed in 2006 and now costs about $1.8 million. The convertible (the one we drove) is about $300,000 more.
Hill said the idea behind building the Veyron really sprang from the larger idea of "what Piech was after -- it was about assembling the greatest collection of automotive brands in the industry." VW also owns Lamborghini, Bentley and Audi.
Driving the Grand Sport -- as opposed to riding around as a passenger -- is, in the end, like driving the ten-tenths version of a muscular, over-the-road GT car. If the Aston Martin will do X, in the way of performance, the Grand Sport will do Triple X. If a Ferrari will jump through hoops, the Grand Sport will jump through them backwards and blindfolded.
Getting into the Grand Sport is like getting into any low-slung sports car, but once you're in there it is roomy for you and the passenger and not for much else. You can bend the seatback forward and hang your jacket on a hook on the seatback. Adjust the seats -- no power seats; the electric motors add weight -- adjust the steering wheel. Insert key and turn it, hit the start button. Vroom. It's automatic, seven speeds, but it has the requisite paddle shifting or center-console-manumatic shifting. The car has so much power that any kind of shifting of gears is superfluous.
On the road, you can go as fast you want, you can play Ricky Racer and go zoom-zoom all over the place, or you can just drive it like an old Buick that's heading for the barn. Doesn't matter. The car does what you want it to do. (Ed. note: As well it should, for $2.1 million.)
But there are some things that set it apart from your normal autobahn-burner. The car has the automotive equivalent of an airplane's black box, a "telemetric diagnostic" system that constantly monitors the car's activities, takes its pulse, as it were, and reports all this information back to Bugatti headquarterse in Molsheim via a hidden onboard cellphone. A GPS-linked navigation device tells Molsheim where the car is and how the car is doing. If Molsheim detects, for example, that tire pressure is low, somebody at Bugatti will call the owner and tell him.
I asked Hill if there wasn't a bit of Big Brother in all this -- the Bugatti gremlins know exactly where you are, all the time -- but he said that of all the U.S. owners (by the way, they're all men, from their late 30s to early 70s, captains of industry, techos, the usual run of rich males), none of them has asked to have it switched off.
Some other fun facts: you cannot open the windows when driving more than 155 mph (safety feature; has to do with aerodynamics). There is a separate "high speed key" you insert down near the driver's left seat rail. At more than 233 mph, if the steering deviates more than 15 degrees to right or left, or if you tap the brakes, the car immediately slows down to 233 mph. Only 233 mph.
The removable carbon fiber top won't fit in the car, so it has to be left at home. What if you're out there, topless, and it starts to rain? Taking a cue from a race track photo of a couple in a Type 35 Bugatti, holding an umbrella as the car moves around the pits during a rainstorm, Bugatti engineers gave the Grand Sport a folding umbrella that stores in the tiny trunk up front. When it rains, you open this umbrella and it fits the roof precisely, locking into the hardtop's attachment points. A word of caution: don't go more than 100 mph with the cloth soft top.
The car normally gets between 8 and 14 miles per gallon. If you drive it at full tilt, however, (remember, full tilt is 200-mph-plus) it will run out of gas in 12 minutes.
On the road the other day, driving from San Francisco up to the Napa Valley wine country, the car was a magnet. People leaned out of their SUVs or pickups, snapping photos with cell phone cameras. There were a lot of smiles and approving thumbs up.
At one point, a man driving a Mercury Mariner SUV motioned excitedly -- he wanted us to pull over. As we stood by the side of the road, he looked at the car adoringly and asked about it.
"You know you've won," he said, "when you can get that car." A few days later, I called him -- his name is David Miles and he's a senior executive with A + F GmbH, a firm that builds and operates huge solar power plants -- and he said he thought it was "an absolutely gorgeous car."
And would he buy one?
"I don't know," he said. "How could you explain that to your friends, even if you could afford it. It's over the top, for sure. If I did own one, I'd have a bit of a time staying out of it."
"Any guy who doesn't have an eye on that car has probably just got his mind some place else," he said.
So... there it is. There are 11 dealers around the U.S. Bugatti says it's going to make 150 Grand Sports and 300 coupes.
But it is, after all, a car. So what happens if it breaks down in the middle of nowhere?
"If it's in warranty," Hill said, "we send a transporter to pick it up. If it's out of warranty, the owner pays" to have it sent to the nearest dealer or to a special VW Group technical facility outside Los Angeles.
But having to foot the bill to have the car sent a few thousand miles to get fixed "is not an issue with this owner group," Hill said.
"They don't skimp on what they're doing."
SPECIFICATIONS:
2009 Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport, mid engine, all-wheel drive two-door convertible.
Price: test model, $2.1 million, including sales tax and delivery (price fluctuates according to the value of the euro.)
Power train: 8-liter W-16 1,001-horsepower, quadro-turbocharged 16-cylinder engine. Seven-speed automatic transmission, with paddle-shifting and manumatic function.
Curb weight: 4,387 pounds.
Seating capacity: two.
Fuel consumption : 8 mpg, city; 14 mpg, highway.
Fuel tank capacity: 26.4 gallons.
Length: 175.7 inches; width: 78.7 inches; height: 47.4 inches; wheelbase: 106.7 inches.
Warranty: two years/30,000 miles.
Safety: For vehicle safety ratings, visit the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Source: Bugatti Automobiles
Michael Taylor
The Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport parked in San Francisco with a more indigenous form of transport in the background.
Michael Taylor
The Grand Sport's dashboard and center console. The leather on the keyfob is matched to the leather on the seats.
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