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Audi CEO's Dieselgate arrest threatens fragile truce among VW stakeholders

FRANKFURT — The arrest and detention of Audi's chief executive forces Volkswagen Group's competing stakeholders to renegotiate the delicate balance of power that has helped keep Audi CEO Rupert Stadler in office. Volkswagen's directors are discussing how to run Audi, its most profitable division, following the arrest of the brand's long-time boss on Monday as part of Germany's investigations into the carmaker's emissions cheating scandal. The supervisory board of Audi, meanwhile, has suspended Stadler and appointed Dutchman Bram Schot as an interim replacement, a source familiar with the matter said on Tuesday. Schot joined the Volkswagen Group in 2011 after having worked as president and CEO of Mercedes-Benz Italia. He has been Audi's board member for sales and marketing since last September. The discussions risk reigniting tensions among VW's controlling Piech and Porsche families, its powerful labor representatives and its home region of Lower Saxony. VW has insisted the development of illegal software, also known as "defeat devices," installed in millions of cars was the work of low-level employees, and that no management board members were involved. U.S. prosecutors have challenged this by indicting VW's former chief executive Martin Winterkorn. Stadler's arrest raises further questions. Audi and VW said on Monday that Stadler was presumed innocent unless proved otherwise. Munich prosecutors detained Stadler to prevent him from obstructing a probe into Audi's emissions cheating, they said on Monday. Stadler is being investigated for suspected fraud and false advertising. Here are the main factors deciding the fate of Audi. Background: Audi's role in Dieselgate Volkswagen Group was plunged into crisis in 2015 after U.S. regulators found Europe's biggest carmaker had equipped cars with software to cheat emissions tests on diesel engines. The technique of using software to detect a pollution test procedure, and to increase the effectiveness of emissions filters to mask pollution levels only during tests, was first developed at Audi. "In designing the defeat device, VW engineers borrowed the original concept of the dual-mode, emissions cycle-beating software from Audi," VW said in its plea agreement with U.S. authorities in January 2017, in which the company agreed to pay a $4.3 billion fine to reach a settlement with U.S. regulators.

Trump reportedly says he wants to wipe German cars off the U.S. map

BERLIN/FRANKFURT — A report that U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to pursue German carmakers until there are no Mercedes-Benz rolling down New York's Fifth Avenue dented shares in the luxury car manufacturers on Thursday. An excerpt from German magazine Wirtschaftswoche's article, which cited several unnamed European and U.S. diplomats but did not include any direct quotes, could not be independently verified, while a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Berlin referred questions to Washington. The news and current affairs magazine said Trump had told French President Emmanuel Macron in April that he aimed to push German carmakers out of the United States altogether. Macron's administration in Paris declined to comment on the report. The Trump administration last week opened a so-called Section 232 trade investigation into vehicle imports, which could result in a 25 percent tariff on cars on the same "national security" grounds Washington used to impose metals duties in March. This could destroy exports by German carmakers, which control 90 percent of the U.S. premium market and are the biggest European Union exporters of cars to the United States. BMW owns Rolls-Royce, while Daimler has Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen controls Bentley, Bugatti, Porsche and Audi. Daimler, BMW and Audi declined comment. Porsche was not immediately available for comment. BMW shares were trading 0.5 percent lower at 0939 GMT, while Daimler and VW's shares were down 1 percent and 1.6 percent respectively, underperforming Germany's blue-chip DAX. Trump has railed against German carmakers before. And in early 2017, in an interview with German newspaper Bild, he said he would impose 35 percent tariffs on imported cars. At the time, the president called Germany a great car producer but said that the business relationship with the United States was an unfair one-way street. Germany's auto industry association VDA says its members exported 657,000 vehicles to North America last year, with total exports of vehicle components, cars, engines, as well as second-hand vehicles totaling 31.2 billion euros in 2016. Imports from the United States to Germany amounted to 7.4 billion euros, meaning a trade deficit of 23.8 billion euros the VDA's latest available figures show. However, German brands also have huge factories in the United States, where they built 804,000 cars last year, VDA said, providing jobs for U.S. workers. Berlin has reacted angrily to the U.S.

1931 Bugatti Type 56 Quick Spin | Not the Bug you'd expect

Bugatti stores a handful of historically significant cars in a picturesque building located a stone's throw from its factory. One doesn't blend in with the rest of the collection. It's a small, yellow and black two-seater named Type 56 that looks more like a horseless carriage than a grand prix-winning machine. It wasn't designed to race. Ettore Bugatti, the company's founder, built the electric runabout in 1931 to drive on his property. Why choose to go electric? It doesn't require an immense leap of imagination to picture Bugatti poetically wafting around his estate in a decommissioned race car. The answer likely lies in ease of use. In the 1930s, it took considerably less effort to start an electric car than one equipped with a gasoline-powered engine. Size might be another factor in this equation. The Type 56 is visibly shorter and narrower than a Smart Fortwo, so it squeezes through narrow passageways with ease and boasts a tight turning radius. Julius Kruta, Bugatti's head of tradition, showed us how to operate it. The driver sits on the right side of the bench seat and uses his left hand to turn the front wheels with a boat-like tiller. From there, the Type 56 becomes remarkably straight-forward to drive; it's not as daunting as it appears to be at first glance. After releasing the parking brake, getting the car into gear requires pushing down on a foot-actuated, spring-loaded lock and using the shorter of the two levers that stick out from the wood floor to take the car out of park and choose forward or reverse. The taller lever selects one of the four gears, which are all available in both directions of travel. Power comes from an electric motor mounted directly over the rear axle. It's derived from (but not identical to) the starter motor used in some of Bugatti's bigger cars. It makes a single horsepower, which represents little more than a rounding error on the Chiron's specifications sheet. Batteries hidden under the seat cushion zap the motor into action for up to 40 minutes. Charging them takes a couple of hours. The 770-pound Type 56 has a top speed of roughly 20 mph. It was fully street-legal when it was new. It kept up with horse-drawn carriages and many of the similarly-sized runabouts zig-zagging through the region at the time. Letting it loose in today's traffic would mean risking death by crossover.

2019 Bugatti Chiron Sport is more hardcore with better handling

Bugatti has created a hotter version of the Chiron called the Chiron Sport. How does Bugatti make the monstrously powerful Chiron even more extreme? Well, it doesn't have anything to do with greater power or speed. The car has the same 1,479 horsepower. Instead, Bugatti focused on improving handling by upgrading the chassis and making it lighter. It's not much lighter, mind you. Bugatti only shed about 40 pounds from the standard Chiron. This was done with lighter wheels, glass and more carbon fiber components. Bugatti seems to be most proud of the car's carbon fiber windshield wipers, which Bugatti claims is a first for production cars. They are actually fairly impressive, weighing 77 percent less than the standard ones. They also use 3D-printed aluminum in the tips. They should go nicely with Bugatti's 3D-printed titanium brake calipers. In the handling department, Bugatti addressed the suspension and drivetrain. The shocks are now stiffer, and the steering has been retuned. The all-wheel-drive system now features torque vectoring to direct power to either side. Between the weight savings and new suspension, Bugatti claims the Chiron Sport lapped the Nardo handling track 5 seconds faster than the standard model. The Chiron Sport also brings along visual changes to make it completely clear that this is not some run-of-the-mill Chiron. It's available in a limited selection of colors for the front end including red, blue, silver and dark grey. These are coupled with an exposed carbon fiber finish for the tail of the car. The front color is then carried over to the big "C" design element that is finished in aluminum on normal Chirons, and to other elements such as the bottom of the rear wing and the contrasting "16" in the grille mesh (which, we must add, makes it look like it's suiting up for a basketball team). The wheels are unique to the Sport, as are the quartet of round exhaust outlets. The interior is made darker and more serious thanks to a liberal use of black anodized aluminum switchgear, and black leather and Alcantara. If the harder-core Chiron Sport is exactly what you've been looking for in a hypercar, you'd better have some serious bank, specifically $3.26 million. There won't be too long of a wait for it, though, since Bugatti expects to deliver the first ones at the end of the year. Related Video:

Vile Gossip: Ladies who launch

Jean Jennings has been writing about cars for more than 30 years, after stints as a taxicab driver and as a mechanic in the Chrysler Proving Grounds Impact Lab. She was a staff writer at Car and Driver magazine, the first executive editor and former president and editor-in-chief of Automobile Magazine, the founder of the blog Jean Knows Cars and former automotive correspondent for Good Morning America. She has lifetime awards from both the Motor Press Guild and the New England Motor Press Association. Look for more Vile Gossip columns in the future. The year was 2006. We were driving a Bugatti Veyron 16.4 across the Florida Panhandle from Jacksonville to Panama City, only because I couldn't convince Bugatti to let me be the first to drive its exotic powerhouse, the world's fastest car at that time, all the way across America. One gleaming example had arrived in time for the Amelia Island Concours d'Elegance, where the journos massed for their quick test drives out the front drive of the Ritz Carlton, down a short stretch of the A1A, and back to the Ritz. Not far enough for me. I wanted to take the Veyron in all of its 16-cylinder, 1,001-horsepower, $1.3-million-dollar glory on a coast-to-coast extravaganza of a road trip. Never hurts to ask. I asked. Once the Bugatti guys stopped hyperventilating, I explained that the coastal adventure would be contained wholly within the state of Florida, from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf of Mexico. My secret destination, however, was to be Vernon, Florida, home of the great Errol Morris' classic documentary about a town in the Panhandle with the highest per-capita population of citizens who'd blown off or whacked off a limb for insurance money. (Google "Nub City.") The Swiss head of Bugatti public relations thought it hilarious. He showed up in a van with a couple of German mechanics to follow us and a failed French Formula 1 driver to serve as my chaperone. I came with a photographer from Germany and one of the most infamous of bad-boy auto magazine tech editors, the irrepressible Don Sherman. Sherman had his own reason for going, and it had nothing to do with a Veyron to Vernon. Once we gave up looking for nubbies, he ordered me to veer south to the handgrip of the Panhandle, familiarly known as the Redneck Riviera. The Don was aiming to secretly execute the Veyron's first Launch Control blastoff in captivity.

Bugatti EB 110-based SP-110 Edonis is back from the dead

When Bugatti went belly up in the mid 1990s, a group of former employees founded B Engineering. At the time, Bugatti was building the EB 110, a supercar whose performance and power ratings would shame most cars on the road today. Just 139 EB 110s were built between 1991 and 1995, but now the car has made a return. Sort of. Casil Motors has announced a 15-model run of the SP-110 Edonis Fenice, a EB 110-based supercar with sleepy-eyed styling and an updated powertrain. The history of the car is a bit convoluted. In the late 1980s, Bugatti was purchased by Romano Artioli. By 1991, the company was back to producing cars with the EB 110. It was a monster that was about as far ahead of its contemporaries as the Bugatti Chiron is today. The EB 110 packed a 550 horsepower quad-turbo 3.5-liter V12. It sent power to all four wheels through a six-speed manual transmission and hit 60 mph in just 3.2 seconds on the way to a top speed of 216 mph. Few cars short of the McLaren F1 could touch it. The car wasn't enough to prevent Bugatti from filing for bankruptcy by 1995. Volkswagen purchased it in 1998. Artioli and a group of former engineers eventually founded B Engineering. They purchased the remaining EB 110 components and revealed the EB 110-based Edonis on Jan. 1, 2000. It ditched the all-wheel drive and increased the power, but further details on changes are vague. The car never made it to production. Recently, Las Vegas-based Casil Motors stepped in to finish what B Engineering started. The car you see here is called the SP-110 Edonis Fenice. Underneath the aluminum bodywork you'll find the carbon-fiber monocoque from an EB 110. The engine is a 3.8-liter version of the EB 110's V12. It has been cranked to 720 horsepower, and the quad-turbo setup was ditched for two large-displacement turbos. Casil Motors says the car can hit 60 mph in 3.4 seconds (slower possibly because of the rear-drive setup), 100 mph in 8.2 seconds and has a top speed of more than 220 mph. It still uses a six-speed manual transmission. Casil Motors is offering a range of options, from a stripped-down track version to a kitted-out luxury model. The optional Rinascita Aero Package fixes some of the car's questionable styling choices. Only 15 will be built. Pricing hasn't been announced, but Casil Motors is requiring a $2,500 deposit. Don't expect this to be cheap. A clean EB 110 GT is going up for auction in March for nearly $1 million.

Bugatti Chiron to get 3D-printed titanium brake calipers

Automakers have only recently started to take advantage of 3D printing. It's been interesting to see the wide variety 3D-printed parts being put into production. Mini now offers customizable trim and interior pieces. Michelin created an airless 3D-printed tire that looks a bit like an oversized sand dollar. The Koenigsegg Agera One:1 uses 3D-printed turbochargers. This week, Bugatti announced that it's testing 3D-printed brake calipers on the new Chiron. These eight-piston fixed calipers look wild, featuring an almost organic shape that ditches any unnecessary material in an effort to shave weight. Traditional calipers are limited in shape by the casting process. Aluminum must fill a mold, meaning there will always be some excess material. Using a 3D printer allows Bugatti to create the part layer by layer. While most calipers today are made from aluminum (including the ones currently on the Chiron), these new ones from Bugatti are crafted with titanium. The automaker says these calipers are the largest functional component made of 3D-printed titanium. The shape maximizes stiffness and reduces unsprung weight at the car's corners. Bugatti says this particular titanium alloy is used in the aerospace industry on parts like airplane wings and rocket engines. The new calipers weigh 6.4 pounds each, significantly less than the 10.8 pounds of the outgoing model. Tensile strength is up, too, meaning the parts are both lighter and stronger than before. The main drawback of the new part is the extremely long production time. It takes 45 hours to print each individual caliper. That's not really too much of an issue with a limited-production model like the Chiron. The first trials will begin early this year, and Bugatti hopes to reduce the production time as testing goes forward. Still, don't expect to see 3D-printed titanium calipers on a Toyota Camry anytime soon. Related Video: Related Gallery Bugatti Chiron: First Drive View 67 Photos News Source: Bugatti Plants/Manufacturing Bugatti Technology Coupe Luxury Performance Supercars brakes Bugatti Chiron

First-built 1931 Bugatti Type 55 could fetch $5 million at auction

The very first example built of the 1931 Bugatti Type 55, one of the rarest and most coveted sports cars of the 1930s, has hit the auction block, and it won't come cheap. California auction house Gooding & Co. expects the two-seater to fetch between $4 million and $5 million next month in Scottsdale, Ariz. Stamped chassis 55201, this particular model is reportedly the first of just 38 Type 55 units Bugatti made from 1931 through 1935. It was on display at the 1931 Paris Auto Show and is said to be "one of the most coveted prewar sports cars." She's certainly beautiful. The Type 55 was built atop the chassis that underpinned Bugatti's Type 45 and Type 47 Grand Prix racers. It has unique features not included on later versions, like the GP-style hood with shortened louvers on the side and diagonal louvers in the top of the hood. And dig the yellow-tinted glass on the headlamps. Underneath the hood is a supercharged, twin-overhead cam inline-eight cylinder engine that makes about 132 horsepower driving a four-speed manual transmission. So a Bugatti Chiron, it's not. But it was apparently owned by Duc de le Tremoille, a prominent French aristocrat, then by a Bugatti enthusiast named Dr. Peter Williamson before being restored by a Bugatti specialist in 2012. It also won the French Cup at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance. So, a chance to add a bit of style panache and history to your garage, if you've got a few spare million lying around. The Scottsdale auction takes place Jan. 19-20.Related Video:

Bugatti will send 'Flying Doctors' as part of Chiron recall

Normally, the owner of an automobile gets a letter in the mail when they need to be informed of a recall. But 'normal' isn't nearly good enough for Bugatti owners. When the Chiron is recalled, the owner gets a house call from a so-called 'Flying Doctor' who will, in this case, inspect all 47 Chirons sold worldwide for what could be improperly welded seat brackets. If necessary, according to Bloomberg, the car will be loaded onto a truck and transported to the nearest Bugatti service center where the entire seat assembly will be replaced free of charge. Now that's what we call service. If we're honest, anyone spending upwards of $3 million for a Chiron should quite rightly expect a different level of service from someone spending $30,000 on a Volkswagen. But what makes the entire situation even more offbeat is that Bugatti estimates only one percent of all Chiron models will need to be fixed. If you do the math, one percent of 47 total vehicles means less than half of one car is expected to be improperly welded. At least Bugatti is being thorough, right? Related Video:

This 1:4 scale Bugatti Chiron engine costs $10,000

Is $10,000 too much for a non-functioning powertrain? Amalgam, a company that specializes in high-end scale models of everything from cars to steering wheels has meticulously crafted a 1:4 scale replica of the 8.0-liter, 16-cylinder, 1,500-horsepower behemoth that powers the Bugatti Chiron. The model is so detailed that at first glance you'd swear it was the real thing, provided a banana isn't used for scale. According to Amalgam, this is the first model engine the company has built since the early 2000s. It worked closely with the engineers at Bugatti to make sure everything is exactly how it appears on the real car. Look close and you'll find all of the parts numbers, barcodes and hose clamps are exactly the same, just smaller. Like the real engine, this W16 features four scale turbochargers. All in, there was roughly 2,500 hours or more than three months of development time. Each model takes 220 hours to assemble, hence the $9,365 price tag. The engine is constructed mainly of pewter and stainless steel. The entire model is 18 inches long and 9 inches high. Pre-orders are open, though first deliveries aren't expected until January. Related Video: