Requiem for the Bugatti Veyron

The venerable Veyron reimagined how super a supercar could get. The last one was finally sold last weekend. What’s next?

A man named Dr. Ferdinand Piech once had a vision: to build the fastest, most luxurious, most complicated, and even most terrifying production automobile ever made. He thought, I want the entire world—from Monaco to Moscow to Miami to Malibu—to turn its head at the sound of an exquisitely handcrafted 16-cylinder, eight-liter engine equipped with four turbochargers. And that’s what Piech, the chairman of Volkswagen AG and its hyper-premium marque, Bugatti, went ahead and built. The Veyron cost around $1.8 million each and set the production car speed record at 268 miles per hour when it hit streets in 2005. This winter, the Veyron, the sui generis savage that put the super in the modern supercar, will stop production. It would make us sad were we not quite sure that Dr. Piech’s next vision will be even more demented. And we welcome that.

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