A good part of the 100 or so Bugatti Veyron 16.4 owners in this world will probably never drive the thing ever again once it’s sitting comfortably on their glossy garage floor. This guy, though, whoever he may be, bought one of these $1.7M supercars in a highly inconspicuous color combination (dark green on black) and drives it like he knows what he’s doing. Major kudos to him. Awesome (yet dated) video and a discussion about the reasoning behind the Veyron after the jump.
The Veyron Conundrum
The Veyron’s a weird car to me. I have an utmost respect for the staggering technology brought together to create this defier of physics. That being said, I’m not the biggest fan of the styling and the interior design despite any argument that it’s actually function before form, but what I can’t stand most is the amount of “Hollywood Hype” the Veyron has. Had it been more like the Ferrari Enzo (which I have similar feelings about), and the big guys at Volkswagen made a list of potential owners rather than putting it up for open sale, the Veyron would be that much better. To owners other than the hill climber above and maybe a few others, the Veyron is just a collector’s item, and to the few people who somehow can’t afford one, it’s overly revered and placed on most high a pedestal. It’s not any easy title to carry, “The Fastest Production Car in the World,” because to so many, fast simply means favorite, and the Veyron gets too much love without any full understanding of the car’s meaning or underlying purpose.
In the end though, I like the Veyron, and not just (or at all) because it’s capable of 252+ miles per hour, but instead because of this: try to name one other ultra-high-end supercar that went through months of snow and sand testing to make sure it would be durable in the real world. Try to name another car of the Veyron’s performance caliber that you can drive in rough road or weather conditions. If ski racks didn’t detract so much from the aerodynamics, you could even take the Veyron on a weekend ski trip up north with potentially little trouble.
Grand Sport
Unfortunately, it’s about to get worse. Much worse. Any celebrity who was on the fence about adding a Veyron to their garage and decided against it now have a reason to reconsider. After all the special edition Veyron models that have come and passed (Pur Sang, Sang Noir, etc), the engineers at VW finally have one that’s nothing like the others: a targa. That’s right, the recently announced Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport can go topless if the driver so chooses. The standard roof is a polycarbonate panel that, when in place, allows the Grand Sport to reach the same top speed of 252 miles per hour as the regular, hard-topped Veyron. Without the top on, the speed is restricted to a reasonable 224 miles per hour. Because the polycarbonate roof piece can’t be stored on board, also included with the Grand Sport is a cloth top, which, when in use, limits the Veyron to only 88 miles per hour.
So what does this mean? Probably nothing. The Grand Sport’s $2.05M price tag seems steep (and we thought that about the original Veyron), but personally I’d say it’s justified. After all, it costs Volkswagen closer to $5M per Veyron built, and now, add the extra cost of the chassis modifications that went into creating such an advanced convertible, and the Veyron almost seems like a relative bargain. Convertibles, for some reason, seem to get an extra edge in popularity and image over whatever roofed version they come from, and I’m not a fan of that mentality. Because of this, the Veyron will become even more of a buy-an-image now. Who, that can afford it, doesn’t want “The Fastest Convertible In The World” in their garage? Oh, right, the celebrities that have “gone green” and have their garages packed to the brim with Priuses. But to the rest of them: don’t buy a Veyron if you don’t understand it. You’re just hurting its image even more.
Once again I go back to the Veyron hillclimber. That is what the Veyron’s all about. Volkswagen designed this car to embrace you in its 1001-HP and give you the driving thrill of your life, not to sit unused as eye candy. In the end, I think the Veyron deserves less respect for what it appears to be—and more for what it is and what it can do.