The word from Bugatti is that things are looking good. “It is great to be at the very top – you don’t have to explain a lot,” says Dr Stefan Brungs, head of sales and marketing at Bugatti.
“We are at the very pinnacle, the most ‘performant’, [with] the most high-tech car in the world and this combination is fantastic.”
They aren’t empty words. By any objective measure the 420km/h Bugatti Chiron, which reached its first two customers in March, is an extraordinary vehicle – an almost fantastical folly built in the company’s factory in Molsheim, France, next to the chateau of its late founder, Ettore Bugatti.
Which is another way of saying that even at the stratospheric asking price – €2.4 million (about $3.6 million) apiece, before tax or customisation – it’s hard to believe the VW Group’s massive investment in the revived brand can be recouped without a more mainstream model.
Yet Brungs told us a second model line won’t happen any time soon. “Bugatti will remain a one-car company. We are going to build 500 of the Chiron [over eight years], and we won’t have different versions.”
Each Chiron takes five to six months to complete, with about 20 people working on it. The average Bugatti buyer spends €300,000 on options, though some spend a great deal more.
“We just had a very touching example,” Brungs says.
Customisation options
“We had a young couple who had a newborn son and they wanted the footprints of the baby in the car, so we put them in platinum in the centre console.” He won’t elaborate on what that little extra cost.
Luxury magazine was able to sit in a prototype, though not drive it at this stage. It is plush and uncluttered, except for that curious arch in the ceiling between the seats. There is just enough leg room for a tall driver, and everything important is gathered around the steering wheel.
Head of communications, Manuela Höhne, admits the circular speedometer is analogue for at least one reason beyond customer preference: if it were digital, people peering through the window (as they always will) wouldn’t see the 0-to-500km/h markings.
There is a separate key that fits into a leather sleeve next to the driver’s seat. An owner must insert it into the adjacent keyhole to reach top speed. Otherwise, the limit is a mere 380km/h. “We wanted it to be a very deliberate decision,” says Höhne.
The original Bugatti company was known for its style and racing success in the 1920s and ’30s, but petered out after World War II. Brungs says the reason the world now needs Bugatti is because “it shows what is possible, it is taking the possible to the next level, making the best even better, and being very radical”.
Victor Muller has a more eccentric mission – keeping the flame alive for Dutch brand Spyker, which displayed its first cars in 1900 and a radical four-wheel-drive racing car soon after.
Muller says it’s a very good time to be making expensive, limited-edition sports cars. “There is now such a vast group of Ferrari, Lamborghini [and] Aston Martin owners and there is always a small percentage of people who want something else. They are irritated by the fact that their neighbour has the same car as they do.”
Limited edition
Spyker, revived in 2000, is making just 50 examples of its latest C8 Preliator. They will be built in Britain but fitted with an engine from Swedish boutique brand Koenigsegg. The price is $US429,000 ($567,000), before tax and options.
“If you look what’s happened to prices,” says Muller, “we have built 267 cars in the 17 years since I started the company, and they are commanding a huge premium over their original list price.
“Their mileage is very limited … they are primarily perceived to be works of art.”
Spyker’s 17 years have been tumultuous. It ran a Formula 1 team and even acquired Saab after GM sold off the Swedish-based company. “It went very badly,” admits Muller. “We had a few years where we were more or less dead, but we managed to overcome that. ”
At the recent Geneva Motor Show, one of history’s very few Swiss brands announced a comeback. Monteverdi built beautifully styled coupés in the 1960s and ’70s, powered by large capacity American V8s. There were also sedans, convertibles and even a 4WD, though total company production was just 2900 units.
André Glaser, leader of the new car project, tells Luxury Monteverdi could show a “study” in October, exactly 50 years after unveiling its first coupé.It would use a contemporary powertrain but feature the original, spectacular bodywork. “It will probably be like the 918 Porsche, a high-performance hybrid with that sort of performance. It will be a sports car and a lot of the parts will be Swiss-made.”
An alternative to relaunching a heritage brand is to evoke the mood of a bygone era.
The Speedback is a superbly rendered 1960s mash-up with modern Jaguar mechanicals, from England’s David Brown Automotive (unrelated to the Aston Martin owner of the same name). Spokesman Phil Dymoke-Grainger says the £600,000 ($1 million) coupé takes 8500 hours to make. “The idea is to have the passion, the style, the essence of a 1960s GT with the conveniences of a modern car.”
From Croatia, with speed
Croatia is hardly known for its car industry, but Rimac Automobili hopes to change that in a most spectacular fashion: with the stylish, beautifully finished and extraordinarily quick Concept One electric coupé.
The car has an unlikely origin. When he was still a teenager, Mate Rimac began converting his BMW 3-Series to electric power in his garage and then set a series of world acceleration records. He sold some of the patents and attracted outside backers to launch Rimac near Zagreb in 2009. Remarkably, its chief executive is still in his 20s.
The company has built just four customer cars and a few prototypes of the Concept One (one of which was destroyed by Richard Hammond in spectacular fashion), but its main game is to sell technology to others. Already, Aston Martin has announced its spectacular Valkyrie will have a Rimac hybrid battery system.
Monika Mikac, chief operations officer, tells Luxury: "We are one of the rare companies that does all of the car's development and production in-house.
"We produce our own carbon- fibre body, our own chassis, our own propulsion system, motors, inverters, batteries, all the electronic systems. We do development and production of our own infotainment systems. We only buy tyres and, although we don't make the rims, they are produced according to our drawings for the customer."
The Concept One, with exterior styling by young Croatian designer Adriano Mudri, starts at $US1.2 million plus tax and options. The claimed performance is 0-100km/h in 2.8 seconds, with a 305km/h top speed and a maximum range of 600 kilometres.
"We have four motors," says Mikac. "Two in the front, two in the back, each controlling each wheel separately, hundreds of times per second. So basically you can brake one wheel for a millisecond, while accelerating with three others, then completely the opposite in another millisecond, and that's how to keep the car really stable and controlled on the racetrack."
Although Rimac is primarily a technology company, Mikac says the next car will have a higher production volume.
"We would like to scale up to be a Lamborghini or Ferrari-type manufacturer, but we won't go any more mass market than that."
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