Bugatti Veyron 16.4

Say "European sports car" and muscular German Porsches or sexy Italian Ferraris immediately come to mind. But the continent's newest challenger for the title of world's coolest car comes from France.

The new Bugatti 16.4 Veyron also is contending for most expensive car, with a price tag of around £850,000. But that princely sum gets you a car that just might be the world's fastest non-race car. The folks at Bugatti say their new buggy aims for a top speed of more than 250 mph, thanks to its 8.0-liter W16 engine (essentially a pair of V-8 engines mounted side by side) that produces a whopping 1001 horsepower. (A NASCAR Winston Cup stock car produces about 750 horsepower). The Bugatti Veyron is almost the same size as the Lamborghini Murcielago, but its exterior is much rounder and softer, and is set off by a love-it-or-hate-it black shell that covers much of the hood, roof and trunk area.

In theory, the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 will accelerate from a standstill to well over 100 mph in the time it takes to read this sentence. The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 is utterly, stunningly, jaw droppingly brilliant. When you push a car past 180 mph, the world starts to get awfully fizzy. When you go past 200mph it actually becomes blurred. At this sort of speed the tires and the suspension of the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 are reacting to events that happened some time ago, and they have not finished reacting before they’re being asked to do something else. Happily, stopping distances become irrelevant because you won’t see the obstacle in the first place.

The obvious question: Why would anyone build such a car? Surely no one sees doing 250 mph on the highway. There can be no commercial logic behind such a crazy machine, even with the Veyron's price tag. Not even as a "halo model"— a reputation booster - for the VW group that builds it does the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 make sense. No Bugatti owner wants it known he's driving a Volkswagen and no one will know. When the 1,000-hp figure was announced came bewilderment - why was VW, which already owned Lamborghini and Bentley, producing a super car from a long-dead marquee? Many believed that 1,000 hp (the actual number was said to be 1,001) was simply too much. The car would be undrivable: wheel-spin, sliding, instability at the extraordinary top speed. To be manageable by an ordinary driver, it would need so many electronic anti-skid systems that the driver wouldn't really be in command at all, computers would. And there were other engineering challenges: making a gearbox to handle all that torque, keeping the engine cool, and so on.

For all true sports car enthusiasts, it is commonly understood that the gearbox in an F1 car only has to last a few hours. Volkswagen wanted the Veyron’s to last 10 or 20 years. And keep in mind, the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 is a far more powerful than any F1 car could ever hope to be. The result, a seven-speed double-clutch flappy paddle affair that took a top team of over 50 engineers over five years to perfect. The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 is more than just the end result of this perfection, it is the true epitome of anything you will ever drive. Other cars are merely "small guest houses" on the front at Brighton and the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 is the Burj Al Arab. It makes even the Enzo and the Porsche Carrera GT feel rather slow and pointless. The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 is a triumph for lunacy over common sense, a triumph for man over nature and a triumph for Volkswagen over absolutely every other car maker in the world.