- The Bugatti Veyron entered production in 2005 with a quad-turbo 8.0-litre W16 engine producing 736kW.
- Top speed was recorded at 407km/h, making it the first production car to exceed 400km/h.
- Bugatti built 450 Veyrons, with VW Group reportedly losing millions on each example.
Two decades on, the Bugatti Veyron has slipped neatly from headline-grabbing brute into cult icon.
Production began in 2005, but it still manages to stop car people in their tracks, partly because even in today’s world of four-digit power figures, the numbers remain absurd.
Numbers that never get old
Try this on for size: 736kW from an 8.0-litre quad-turbo W16, all good for 407km/h. That’s in a car you could, in theory, drive to the opera without breaking a sweat. The stats alone made it mythical in its day, but what makes the Veyron enduringly cool is how unlikely it was to exist at all.
Piech’s wild bet
The story starts with Ferdinand Piëch, the famously ambitious VW Group boss. In the late 1990s, he pitched a 736kW, 400km/h road car on a Japanese bullet train.
Engineers thought he’d lost the plot, yet he had form in making impossible ideas real.
Early concepts showed front-engine W18s, but after years of trial and error (and a few exploding driveshaft seals), the final W16 design arrived.
“Knowing Herr Piëch pretty well, the Veyron is a typical Piëch car because he is totally dedicated to engineering challenges,” recalled former Bugatti president Dr Franz-Josef Paefgen. Engineers called it “crazy,” but they delivered.
From misfit to legend
At launch, many dismissed it as too heavy, too clinical, not a “real” supercar. Gordon Murray, father of the McLaren F1, judged it a technical statement more than a driver’s car. Yet, like the Lexus LFA or Jaguar XJ220, time has been kind. Younger enthusiasts now see the Veyron for what it was: a moonshot built more for pride than profit.
Bugatti made 450, reportedly losing millions on each. As car execs like to say, the industry is about making money, not cars. The Veyron flips that on its head. It was vanity engineering, bank-draining and excessive - and that’s exactly why, 20 years later, it feels cooler than ever.
