Tag Archives: Bugatti

The gorgeous Bugatti La Finale concept tributes and highlights its internal combustion engine

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We’re somewhere in the late 21st century. Electric cars aren’t just the norm, they’re sort of antiquated and mankind has moved onto the next step – hydrogen fuel cells. It’s been decades since any company’s launched a car with a gas-powered internal combustion engine, until the Bugatti La Finale surfaces… a car that pays homage to the ICE. The La Finale isn’t a car, it’s a vessel, a museum for the internal combustion engine. Rather than hiding this vintage technology under an opaque hood, the La Finale displays this antique technology like a crown jewel, with a transparent hood that lets you admire the engine and its pistons in all their glory.

The La Finale concept takes the design attributes of the La Voiture Noire and amps it up, with split surface bodywork that doesn’t feel completely like the modern-day Bugatti DNA, but rather pays tribute to Ettore Bugatti’s brother Rembrandt Bugatti, who was an artist and a sculptor who had a remarkable understanding of surfaces. The car comes with double-tone paneling, using metallic sheeting as well as carbon-fiber to create an interplay that makes the car look less blockish and more sculptural. The La Finale’s magnum opus, however, is its hood, which is made from a transparent glass that cascades upwards to turn into the windshield. This glass provides an exhibition-window into the car’s 6-cylinder engine, which designer Serkan Budur visualizes will be a vintage rarity in the future. This showcase gives the car’s engine the precious treatment it deserves, while right in front of it, visible through the gap between the two surfaces, are suspension-springs that further the car’s approach to showcasing its internals in an exhibitionist fashion. Inspired by the Bugatti designs of the yesteryear, during the era of its founder, Ettore Bugatti, the car retains the horseshoe radiator, an iconic element that ties all of the company’s cars together. There’s an absence of the C-bar design that is usually present in all of Bugatti’s more contemporary models, but for the sake of artistic expression, I’ll let that slide. After all, the point of the La Finale isn’t to look at the C bar – it’s to admire the car in its entirety, and its precious relic-like internal combustion engine!

Designer: Serkan Budur

How Bugatti built the Centodieci hypercar in six months

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During Monterey Car Week there's no shortage of nostalgia. Both the Pebble Beach and Quail gatherings are magnets for almost any vintage car you can imagine. So it made sense for Bugatti to unveil its new Centodieci hypercar, a nod to the iconic EB11...

The Bugatti Centodieci is a bold step away from Bugatti’s design DNA

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Over the past couple of years, and couple of cars, Bugatti’s built a rather strong visual language with its cars, ranging from the Veyron to the Chiron, Divo, and even the La Voiture Noire from last year… that’s until the surprise unveiling of their latest and boldest car ever, the Centodieci.

Unveiled to mark the company’s 110th year anniversary, the Centodieci is based on the Chiron, and is an incredibly limited-edition tribute to the EB110 from the 1990s. Limited to only 10 units, the Centodieci is a 1600 hp powerhouse with an 8-liter W16 engine and an acceleration of 0-62 miles in a staggering 2.4 seconds… all this while being 44 pounds lighter than the Chiron, owing to a heavy dependence on carbon-fiber components.

It isn’t the Centodieci’s performance (which is definitely worth writing home about) that really catches our eye here, but rather its design. Created as a tribute to the EB110, Bugatti’s first modern hypercar, the Centodieci is a very conscious deviation from the style Bugatti’s cultivated over the decades. Aside from the horseshoe-shaped grille on the front, there isn’t much that one would say is ‘innately Bugatti-esque’ about the car in the first place. The C-shaped pillar is so abstracted it’s barely there, and features an unusual cheese-grater detail on it (Are cheese-graters the new trend this year? What am I missing here?)

The car’s headlights still have the mean, discerning stare that you could see in the Chiron, but are a tad more devious and menacing. The car’s logo finds itself being placed on the hood too, instead of within the iconic horseshoe grille. The coupe comes with the absence of a traditional A-pillar too, as the windscreen sprawls all the way from the front across to the sides, providing a panoramic view for the driver and the passenger seated beside. The interiors are still under development, say the Centodieci’s design team, but will for most parts follow the design cues of the Chiron. Over all, the Centodieci, pretty consciously adopts a much more angular design language as a tribute to the Marcello Gandini-designed Bugatti EB110, as opposed to the organic styling of Bugatti’s design DNA developed over the Veyron, Chiron, Divo, and even the La Voiture Noire in the last few decades. The car, even as a matter of fact, chooses to be boldly different in its color too, making itself available exclusively in white!

Designer: Bugatti

The Bugatti Type 103 concept has a Bugatti front and a Batmobile rear

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The soul of a Bugatti definitely resides within this concept by Invisive. Its stylings are a lot like a modern-day Chiron, with the slick horizontal headlights and the signature C-cut on the car’s rear pillar. However, the Type 103 really turns things up a notch with its horse-shoe grill at the front. With a wider base, the grill goes from horse-shoe to practically a parabola shape, almost giving the car a discernible grumpy-face. I imagine if a magnificent car like the Bugatti Type 103 was stuck in traffic, it would have a grumpy-face too. The grille on the front is quite sloped too, resulting in an overhang on the front that’s relatively large, but makes the car look longer, along with a back that absolutely looks Batmobile-ish with surfaces trailing off backwards to make the car look like a motion-blur even when it’s standing still. It also has a centrally located vertical tail-light/aerowing better visible in the top-view that reinforces that Batmobile image, almost looking like the car has a tiny afterburner on its back like a jet.

The objective was to take Bugatti’s C-series and toy with the curves and surfaces, amping the design up while sticking to Bugatti’s design heritage as much as possible. Designed, modeled, and rendered over a week-long project timeline, the Type 103 could stand right beside the rest of Bugatti’s cars and nobody would be able to tell original from fan-made concept. In all ways, it captures the natural progression of the Bugatti series, down to the iconic design details and color choices, to even the surfacing and photo-realistic rendering. I’ll give the exaggerated rear a pass, just because it looks so incredible I want it to be true!

Designer: Invisive

Bugatti unveils a $33,000 EV for (rich) kids

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For its 110th birthday, Bugatti is going back to its roots. The French car manufacturer is digging up the Bugatti Type 35, the company's famous racing car also called the Bugatti Baby, and giving it a modern makeover. The limited-run Bugatti Baby II...

Bugatti’s 110th anniversary car is ‘ferociously futuristic’

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This is Bugatti’s latest car. I use car in the most technical sense possible, because the La Voiture Noire (literally translating to The Black Car) is literally a car, complete with an engine, four wheels, doors and such, but it’s also a trophy. The one-off La Voiture Noire celebrates Bugatti’s 110th anniversary as an established automotive brand.

A modern reinterpretation of Jean Bugatti’s Type 57 SC Atlantic (you’ll definitely see similarities in the rear half of the vehicle), the La Voiture Noire also captures the Bugatti brand’s signature stylings. The C-shaped window cutaway is still very present in the La Voiture Noire, and it also retains Bugatti’s iconic tunnel-shaped front grille. At the same time, the La Voiture Noire is testament to Bugatti’s evolving aesthetic. The La Voiture Noire builds on the Bugatti Divo’s aggressive ‘face’, going for a demeanor that’s authoritative, rather than furious-looking. Unlike the Divo, it also relies on gentle, smooth curves that still evoke a sense of extreme speed.

“Every single component has been handcrafted and the carbon fibre body has a deep black gloss only interrupted by the ultrafine fibre structure. This is a material that has been handled perfectly,” says Bugatti designer Etienne Salomé. “We worked long and hard on this design until was nothing that we could improve. For us, the coupé represents the perfect form with a perfect finish.” The car features a one-of-a-kind 16-cylinder engine, delivering so much power that the car packs a mind-numbing six tailpipes. The La Voiture Noire not only is a symbol of Bugatti’s 110-year-old legacy of superior carmaking and fine engineering, but it also is a testament to Bugatti’s exclusivity. In fact, the company has only made a single model of the La Voiture Noire, packed with a whopping price tag of $12.5 million… and guess what. It’s already sold!

Designer: Bugatti

Watch Bugatti test the first 3D-printed brake caliper

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Back at the start of 2018, Bugatti revealed that it was working on the first 3D-printed brake caliper. Now that the year is winding to a close, it's finally ready to show the caliper in action. Bugatti has posted a video (below) of a test that simula...

Lego Technik’s Bugatti Chiron is the ultimate toy for grown boys

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When cars and a universal, timeless toy intersect, it’s bound to be a marriage made in heaven. Lego Technik unveiled their life-size replica of the French hypercar, Bugatti Chiron. Not only is the resemblance spitting, but the car is also, completely, top-to-bottom (excluding the wheels and a few other parts) made from Lego!

Built from more than a million Lego pieces, the Chiron replica isn’t just a standing model. It actually drives too! Weighing over 3,000 pounds, the car can accelerate to slightly over 12 mph… which sounds even more impressive when you realize that the car’s engine is entirely made from Lego too! Two batteries in the car serve as its overall power source… and although there isn’t a gas or acceleration pedal (as the car is driven by voltage level), there is a working pedal for the brake. Check out the video above, as official Bugatti pilot Andy Wallace (the same pilot who test-drove the first Chiron) gives the Lego replica a spin… and expect goosebumps as the spoiler rises up from out of the car’s body, just like in the original Bugatti!

Designer: LEGO

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