The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 exists for one reason: outrageousness. There's no other excuse for a car powered by an 8.0-liter, 16-cylinder engine force-fed by four turbochargers that makes more than 1,000 horsepower. This is a car that will top out at more than 250 mph...and at that speed it burns through all 26.4 gallons in its tank in just under 13 minutes.
And there's clearly nothing more unreasonable than a car that carries a sticker price that, with every passing year, goes deeper and deeper into the seven digits. The Veyron is simultaneously absurd, glorious, inexcusable, momentous, silly and deadly serious. Outrageousness never looked as good as it does in the Bugatti Veyron 16.4.
Everything about the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 is designed to a ludicrously high standard. But it's the standards that Ettore Bugatti set for himself and his namesake company back in the early days of the 20th century. Starting with tiny racing cars, Bugattis were always intricately engineered and undeniably beautiful. By the 1920s, working out of his workshop in Molsheim, France, the Italian-born Bugatti was building luxury-touring machines like the Type 30.
By the 1930s he was building the glorious Type 57 that may well be the most beautiful car of the classic era. And of course, Bugatti also built six enormous Type 41 Royale luxury cars between 1927 and 1933 that are still among the most indulgent and coveted machines ever sold. The biggest thing any Bugatti Veyron 16.4 will ever carry is its heritage.
However, the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 doesn't come out of a small shop in Molsheim. Volkswagen purchased the rights to build Bugatti cars in 1998 and built a new plant for Bugatti in nearby Dorlisheim. By 1999 the company was showing the EB 218 midengine concept car designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro that, at least up front, looked like the Veyron. The EB 16/4 Veyron concept followed in 2000 and the all-wheel-drive Bugatti Veyron 16.4 entered production in late 2005.
Owning a Bugatti Veyron 16.4 is investing in the art of the automobile. Except for the fact that it has four wheels, there's nothing about the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 that's remotely normal.
