The Future Car by Bugatti

Dubbed as "The most expensive, most powerful and fastest street-legal production car in the world", the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 can go well over 250 mph (400+ kmph). This airplane on wheels can go from zero to sixty in 2.5 seconds and a base price tag of 1,000,000 Euros ($ 1,300,000.00). Full production started last September 2005; this car is built by Bugatti Automobiles SAS, which happens to be a subsidiary of Volkswagen AG. The car is named after Pierre Veyron, the 1939 Le Mans champion who raced for the original Bugatti firm.

The development of the vehicle started with the EB 18/3 "Veyron" concept car back in 1999 designed be Hartmut Warkuss of Volkswagen. The appearance of the concept car is very similar to the final production car but sported a W18 engine and three banks of six cylinders instead of the W16 engine. At the 2001 Geneva Motor Show, former VW chairman, Ferdinand Piëch announced the production of Veyron but will be using W16 engine that promised a top speed of 250 mph. Development continued throughout 2001 and the production was pushed back by delays and setbacks on the design. This is mainly due to the difficulty of keeping a car stable at high-speed. One Veyron prototype crashed and another spun out while being demonstrated publicly in Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca. By 2003, Piëch retired as chairman of Volkswagen and was replaced by Bernd Pischetsrieder, who sent the Veyron project back to the drawing board to resolve the major issues. Bugatti later announced that the car would be officially called Bugatti Veyron 16.4.

Under the hood, the Veyron 16.4 features a W16 engine with 4 banks of 4 cylinders. The engine looks like two V8 engines merged into one. The engine is equipped with 4 turbochargers and displaces 8.0 L with a square 86 x 86 mm bore and stroke. It also uses a dual-clutch DSG computer-controlled manual transmission and 7 gear ratios using shifter paddles behind the steering wheel that makes an 8ms shift time possible. It can also be driven by full automatic transmission. The Veyron runs at full-time all-wheel drive that was developed by Haldex and uses special Michelin run-flat tires designed specifically for the Veyron. The wheelbase measures at 2.7 meters while the length is 4.4 meters and width at almost 2 meters (1.99 meters) and 1.2 meters in height. The engine comes with 3 radiators for its cooling system, another one exclusively for the air-to-liquid intercoolers, 2 for the air conditioning, 1 for the transmission oil, 1 for the engine oil and 1 for the hydraulic oil used by the spoilers with a total of 10 radiators simultaneously operating for the Veyron 16.4.

The Veyron 16.4 is the quickest production car to reach 62 mph with an estimated time of 2.5 seconds. As a matter of fact, Veyron's 0-200 mph time is quicker than McLaren F1's 120-200 mph time. Thus making it the quickest-accelerating production car up to date. Because of this, the Veyron 16.4 also consumes more fuel than any other production car. At full throttle, the Veyron can empty its 100 L fuel tank in just 12.5 minutes.

Michael Russell
Your Independent Sports Car guide.
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