Tag Archives: Bugatti

The new Bugatti Bolide’s headlights look suspiciously a lot like the SpaceX logo

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Touted as “the most extreme, uncompromising, fastest and lightest” car it has ever made, the Bugatti Bolide seems to marry the best of Bugatti’s technical genius, design expertise, and brand values into one automobile. Bugatti was known for making some of the world’s lightest racecars before being acquired by Volkswagen. Under their new ownership, the company created record-shattering speed-demons like the Veyron and Chiron, but lacked in the one area they shone in back in the day, a light automobile. The Bolide hopes to be a “radically light vehicle” that harks back to the old Bugatti days, but without compromising on the speed, values, and aesthetic standards the company’s set in modern times.

“We asked ourselves how we could realize the mighty W-16 engine as a technical symbol of the brand in its purest form—with solely four wheels, engine, gearbox, steering wheel and, as the only luxury, two seats,” Bugatti boss Stephan Winkelmann said in a statement. “Important aspects of our considerations were fine-tuning our iconic powertrain without any limitations as regards the weight-to-power ratio”. The result is a car that almost perfectly walks the balance between form and function, with an aesthetic that is drop-dead gorgeous, but also engineered perfectly for performance.

The car comes with a carbon-monocoque body, engineered to make the overall vehicle lighter than a Mini Cooper. Under the hood sits the quad-turbo W-16, one of Bugatti’s engineering marvels. Couple that with the car’s all-wheel-drive and you have a 1,825 horsepower beast capable of hitting well over 300mph and allowing it to complete a Le Mans lap in 3:07 minutes, faster than any LMP1 car.

A lot of the Bolide’s ability to hit high speeds is a direct result of its fusion of design and engineering. The car’s body is lightweight for sure, but it’s also made to maximize downforce, and comes with a couple of unusual features to increase air-flow and reduce drag. The rear wing and front splitter are both adjustable, allowing them to autonomously reposition themselves based on your speed, but by far the Bolide’s most interesting detail lies in its air-intake on the car roof. Made from a morphable outer skin, the roof’s surface changes based on the speed you drive at. It remains flat at lower speeds, but when you start to pick up pace, bubbles on the roof’s surface inflate to increase its surface-area and allow more air to come in contact with it, optimizing air-flow to the rear wing. To indicate the experimental nature of this new, innovative detail, Bugatti even employed an X-shape in both the headlights and the taillights. The headlights heavily remind me of the X in the SpaceX logo, but I digress… The interiors reinforce the Bolide’s need for speed. If the exterior spots shape-shifting air-intakes and four afterburners, the insides are designed to look like the cockpit of a jet engine, with two racing seats complete with six-point harnesses, a complex steering wheel in front of a digital gauge cluster, and a small panel on the dash with push-button transmission controls and a few other switches.

The Bolide was created as a grand tribute of Bugatti’s car-making prowess and its racetrack domination ever since the Type 35 in 1924, which went on to achieve over 2,000 victories in just 6 years since its production. Designed to inherit the race-track legacy left behind by its ancestor, the Bolide hat-tips Ettore Bugatti’s own genius in creating lightweight race-machines a century ago. The Bolide weighs a mere 1,240 kilograms (2733 pounds), and is currently only a race-track concept. Whether the Bugatti Bolide will go into series production is something that has not been decided yet.

Designer: Bugatti

The Bugatti Next-57 Concept looks like a glorious Chariot from a steampunk future!

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Every car sits somewhere on a spectrum ranging from utilitarianism to craftsmanship. Some cars are more utilitarian than others, other cars showcase a level of artistry that makes them truly stand out… the Bugatti Next-57, I’d argue, sits so far on the artistic end of the spectrum that it really pushes the boundaries of how beautiful a car could look. Created as an homage to the classic Bugatti 57, the Next-57 celebrates every inch of the vintage car by modernizing it, exaggerating it, and making it even more beautiful. The result? A chariot fit for a king, with an incredibly elegant long body that tapers off at the front expose the axles on the front wheels, giving a chariot-like appearance, along with an interior that’s ensconced in luxurious red suede.

The black and red combination are a statement in their own right. Giving the car its mysterious, million-bucks appearance, the chariot’s gloss-black exterior is a magnet for sharp highlights and high contrasts, making it look like a jewel on the road. The car’s long body starts with its edge-lit headlights, sitting between the externally-placed wheels. The wheels are covered by fenders that half-cover it, revealing the luxurious constellation-inspired rims behind, that shine and rotate as the wheels turn.

Move your eye upwards and you arrive at the hood, which comes with its own flair that extends from the front and travels all the way to the top at the roof, creating a physical division that parts the driver’s view into left and right – perhaps not the most useful of details, but it’s worth remembering that the Next-57 is conceptual. This detail mirrors the original 57’s own aesthetic which came with its own metal spine that ran through the center of the car from front to back. The hood then develops an umbrella-esque texture before meeting the car’s rear, which features an elegant edge-lit taillight running from side to bottom to side.

The Bugatti Next-57 is a pretty long car, but it’s still made for just one rider. The car’s door opens to reveal a plush cockpit, draped in red suede. The seat even rotates to face you (almost as if it’s greeting you) and rotates back to face the dashboard once you’re seated. Get the car running and its electric engine powers to life (the use of a textured glass panel instead of a radiator grille leads me to believe the Next-57 has an electric heart)… and if you think the car is a pleasure to look at while it’s standing still, just watching the way the wheels and elongated fenders rotate as you steer the car should easily give you goosebumps! Hey Siri, what’s my heart-rate?

Designer: doinnext_cong

A designer imagines what a Bugatti Luxury SUV would look like…

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Back in 2018 (aka the good old days), president of Bugatti, Stephan Winkelmann, admitted that the luxury automotive brand ‘could’ be working on an SUV to expand their catalog. “The brand is ready for more. The W16 engine is at the core of the brand today, but it won’t remain the heart forever,” the executive said. Amid the speculation, designer André Fonseca imagined what an SUV from the French supercar company would look like… with the trimmings of a luxury automobile.

The Bugatti S1 Luxury SUV isn’t the first concept car we’ve seen of this nature. Our eyes were treated to an absolute beauty in the Bugatti Spartacus concept from last month, and truth be told Bugatti is one of the last few luxury brands to have never forayed into the SUV space. Fonseca’s S1 L-SUV however imagines what that would look like, were it to happen. Needless to say, a Bugatti SUV would have to look marginally different from its racecars, and the S1 L-SUV surely does. It comes with a pretty wild looking 3-bar headlight and sports an interesting break in the surface around the edge of the front, creating an offset of the iconic horseshoe radiator. As with every trueblue Bugatti, the S1 L-SUV comes in a blue paint-job, exploring a combination of light blue on dark blue, with a chrome accent that creates the signature Bugatti C-bar detail. The car comes with four doors, exploring a suicide-door detail on the back, and as we move to the rear of the car, we get this pretty nifty looking tailfin that comes with its own taillight, complementing the edge-lit taillight that’s on the car’s relatively sleek, almost hatchback-ish rear.

Designer: André Fonseca

This Bugatti-inspired espresso machine is here to supercharge your day with caffeine!

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Yamaha makes bikes, but they also make pianos. Bose makes speakers and suspension for truck seats. Ferrari makes cars, but they also have a flourishing fragrance line, so when I see a coffee maker with a Bugatti logo on it, you best believe that I’m more delighted than bewildered!

Don’t worry though, the French automotive company isn’t pivoting to caffeinated beverages, but designer Fábio Martins tried imagining what a conceptual espresso machine from Bugatti would look like. By embracing the company’s automotive DNA and bringing it to kitchen appliances, Martins successfully makes a coffee-machine that looks as rich, luxuriant, and adrenaline-pumping as a Chiron does. The Bugatti Etiron coffee machine comes in the same colors as Bugatti’s cars, with the classic blue and black pairing being its most standout model. If you look at the machine’s front, it perfectly embodies Bugatti’s signature horseshoe grille design by adopting the same shape (and even sporting the grille pattern on its front too!). Move over to the side and the Etiron curves and arches back the same way a Bugatti’s rear does, with even that C-shaped design detail created through a clever surface split! Martins has even detailed what the coffee machine’s ‘chassis’ will look like by imagining the appliance’s inner architecture, and whether it’s on internal components or external body-parts, the Bugatti logo makes its appearance felt.

While I’d imagine that a French-automotive-brand inspired coffee maker would probably come in the format of a French Press (I’d be wrong… French coffees are quite diverse, apparently), the Etiron adopts a more modern, fast, coffee-pod format… which sort of makes sense because of its ability to deliver quality with speed, right??

Designer: Fábio Martins

Bugatti’s most realistic Formula 1 race car was designed by a talented intern

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The Bugatti Type 35 revival is a great example of two things – A designer’s ability to push boundaries and create concepts that capture their passions, and those concepts sometimes being powerful enough to actually pave the way forward for something bigger. Little did Andreis van Overbeeke know that his desire to see Bugatti compete in the Formula 1 series would result in him landing an internship at his dream company. The desire to actually see a Bugatti-branded F1 car pushed Andries to create a concept that he published on Reddit. The images ran their course, reaching Bugatti’s execs, who then went on to invite van Overbeeke to their headquarters in Molsheim, France, for an internship… resulting in a much more fleshed out concept car with the Type 35 revival. The image above shows the Type 35 revival in its glorious avatar standing right beside Bugatti’s own Vision GT vehicle – its spiritual predecessor.

The Type 35 Revival pays tribute to Bugatti’s eponymous winning racecar from the 1929 and 1930 Monaco circuit races. Styled with a similarly long nose and short tapered rear, the Revival echoes the iconic design cues of the 90-year old racecar, while carefully sticking to Bugatti’s signature details which include the horseshoe grille and that absolutely sweet blue and black paint-job. “The car has a powerful high revving internal combustion engine (see the exhausts on top) and was designed to be a fan car with a suckdown system (similar to the Chaparral 2J and Brabham BT46)”, says Overbeeke. He also pointed out that as a hat-tip to the company’s consecutive 3-year win at the Monaco circuits, the Type 35 Revival comes with a graphic of the Monaco racetrack on the side along with its laurels.

While the French automotive company isn’t planning on entering the F1 any time soon, the Type 35 Revival’s design isn’t just a concept for your eyes… You can actually take it for a spin in PlayStation’s Gran Turismo!

Designers: Andries van Overbeeke, Achim Anscheidt, Sasha Selipanov, Etienne Salomé & Frank Heyl.

The Bugatti Spartacus SUV gives the company its own ‘Lamborghini Urus’ moment

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When Lamborghini debuted the Urus, I was a part of the demographic that went “Wait, they did what?!” Never in my lifetime did I think Lamborghini would ever even want to pursue the SUV category, but given that the brand supplies some of the most elite police forces in the world with cop-cars, it probably makes sense to have an SUV that could overtake a roadster on a highway… the Spartacus SUV concept (with its fitting name) hopes to do the same for Bugatti.

The Spartacus hulking SUV concept that ticks the same boxes as the Urus. It feels a lot like its parent company’s design language was seamlessly adapted from sports cars to much larger vehicles, in a way that makes them a class apart. The Urus looks like a Lamborghini, but it doesn’t look the same as say an Aventador or Huracan… the Spartacus is the same way. It has every bit of Bugatti’s DNA in it, but it feels like the company branching out.

In its signature Blue and Black color combination, the Spartacus wears its Bugatti identity on its sleeve. The car sports the iconic horseshoe grille on the front, while the C-bar detail on the side doesn’t just exist, it defines the car’s rear, guiding the back and rounding it off in a complementary way. The car comes with a pretty voluminous body, but its razor-thin headlamps and taillamps help bring about sleekness.

Another interesting detail with the Spartacus is the fact that even though the horseshoe radiator detail remains present on the automobile, behind it lies just an extension of the car’s carbon-fiber bumper, hinting at the fact that this is a first for Bugatti in not one, but two categories – SUVs, and electric vehicles. Just imagine, though… If this thing were painted black and white and came with a shining beacon on top and the word “Police” painted on the side, would you really want to even attempt to mess with it??

Designer: Sajdin Osmancevic

What if Luigi Colani and Bugatti collaborated on a motorcycle concept?

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Indian industrial designer Anay Kshirsagar found himself asking pretty pertinent questions while sitting at home waiting for the lockdown to end. What if Bugatti’s modern automotive DNA could be carried to a motorcycle? What if the motorcycle could, with two wheels, evoke the kind of emotion you’d feel looking at any of Bugatti’s four-wheeled vehicles?

The Audacieux (which is French for Audacious) is a curvy, bold-looking beast that comes with an exaggerated cantilever headlight, a hubless front-wheel, and an overall form that feels like a German x French crossover collaboration between Luigi Colani and Bugatti. Where the Bugatti DNA makes itself explicitly visible is in the two-wheeler’s clear C-shaped design that is a direct reference to the symbolic C-bar in most of the company’s recent cars, as well as a detail beneath the headlamp which corresponds with the horseshoe radiator – an iconic detail that’s practically synonymous with the 111-year-old brand.

Just like its cars, the motorbike comes with the option of a two-tone paint-job. The Bugatti logo makes itself visible in chrome on the hubs of the rear wheel too, and given the conceptual nature of the motorbike, it’s safe to speculate that this tame beast comes with an electric heartbeat.

Designer: Anay Kshirsagar

The Bugatti Gangloff concept feels like an aesthetic blast-from-the-past!

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Designed as an aesthetic bridge between the Bugatti cars of the 30s (the Bugatti Type 57 in particular), and the Bugatti cars post its acquisition by Volkswagen, the Gangloff sort of feels like a combination of the styles set by Jean Bugatti (son of founder Ettore Bugatti) and Jozef Kabaň, the designer who gave us the iconic Veyron.

The Gangloff is all about retaining and highlighting Bugatti’s soul. Its incredibly curvaceous exterior is a sure-shot hat-tip to the Type 57 (especially in the side-view). The fenders on the front and rear quarter panels come with exaggerated curves, pretty emblematic of cars in the 30s, but the minute you switch to the front or rear view, the car’s modern design becomes pretty evident, especially with the LED lights, racecar-style seats, and the horseshoe radiator on the front that resembles the Veyron. In fact, the car even comes with the C-bar around the gate, a feature that’s practically synonymous with the Bugatti brand today.

Just like the exteriors that definitely feel like a fusion of classic and contemporary, the interiors follow suit too, with leather and metal seats that feel both organic and futuristic at the same time. The car features a pretty modern-looking dashboard that still retains a relatively analog design, with no hint of touchscreen displays and artificially intelligent computers… a feature (or lack thereof) that actually feels nice, given how the Gangloff manages to tap equally into one’s feelings of awe as well as of nostalgia… and it probably runs on gasoline too, because sometimes the classics just work!

Designer: Paweł Breshke Czyżewski (Paul Breshke)