This is a story of four charismatic engineers and one near-mythic number. First, the number: 1,000 horsepower. That is the power of the Bugatti EB 16.4 Veyron, an output that surpasses all road cars by such a margin that it looks like a misprint. But no, with the aid of four turbochargers, the Bugatti Veyron 16- cylinder(bugatti veyron 16.4), eight-liter engine manages the power of, say, two Dodge Vipers. Or nine base-model Honda Civics. The car seats two.

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 bugatti veyron price tag of one million euros (at the current exchange rate. that’s $1,2 million). Not even as a halo model—a reputation booster—for the VW group that builds it does the Veyron make sense. No Bugatti owner wants it known he’s driving a Volkswagen.

Is this a vanity project then?

An unkind description. but not an inaccurate one, The project’s chief authors are two of the four engineers in the Veyron story: Ferdinand Piech, instigator and driving force behind the car, and Karl Heinz Neumann, the man Charged with creating a deliv erable model, The Veyron is, in fact, something of a legacy: When the first customer drives the car, which is supposed to happen in April, both men will be gone from the company that built it. The car was announced as a concept in 1999, the fourth in a series of one-off Bugattis that had been shown by VW since 1998, when the company acquired the rights to the marque. Bugatti Is one of the great names in car-making history, but one whose glory days were in the 1930’s. Ettore Bugatti, the third engineer in the Veyron story—though only a ghost in the wings— was an Italian who set up a factory in France in 1909 to build sports cars. An intuitive, stubborn visionary, he was soon creating some of the greatest machines of his era. To equal their record in top-level European motorsports today, you’d have to combine

the output of Ferrari and Porsche, “Nothing is too beautiful, nothing is too expensive”, Bugatti said, and that notion drove his designs of luxury high-performance touring cars, such as the Type 57s Atlantic (see photo above). These, not his racecars, are the machines to which VW claim it Is now building a successor. Ettore Bugstti died in 1947. Postwar France was no place to be building expensive sport cars, and the company died soon after its founder.