1994 "special" Hand Built Replica Type 55 Bugatti on 2040-cars

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Bugatti said to bring an $18M one-off to Geneva

Bugatti already has the limited-edition Chiron Sport "110 Ans Bugatti" on the Geneva Motor Show playlist. The matte-blue coupe celebrates 110 years since Ettore Bugatti's first car, the Type 10. According to several rumors, Bugatti could have something else just as noteworthy alongside. The Supercar Blog reported that the French carmaker will show a one-off model reported to cost 16 million euros, about $18 million at current exchange rates. The buyer has already been chosen, that being one Dr. Ferdinand Piech, grandson of Ferdinand Porsche and ex-chairman of the Volkswagen Group. The rumor couldn't be ignored once Kris Singh — managing director of a U.S. investment firm, Lamborghini Veneno owner, and supercar collector — made a post on Instagram the same day as the Supercar Blog post. Next to an image of the 110 Ans Bugatti, Singh wrote, "it will be fun to see this alongside the Divo and the top secret 16 million euro Bugatti one-off that was made exclusively for Dr. Piech." As chairman of the VW Group, Piech fathered the Veyron when he demanded his engineers turn the 2001 Geneva Motor Show concept into a proper production car. After a roaring 14 years, Piech's tenure ended with a whimper when he was ousted in 2015 in an internal battle with Group CEO Martin Winterkorn. A few months after Piech hit the bricks, dieselgate broke. Last year, U.S. prosecutors charged Winterkorn — who remains in Germany — with wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States in connection with the emissions scandal. Piech, on the other hand, had different pursuers: Volkswagen said in 2017 it might go after the family scion for reportedly leaking about potential cheating on the emissions tests six months before the situation went public. The same year, Piech sold his 14.7 percent stake in the the VW Group's holding company, netting him a billion. So what could the now-81-year-old ex-Caesar be doing with Bugatti now? The easy money is on some kind of Chiron-based coupe, but for a reputed $18 million, this would need to be a massive departure from the Chiron. Assuming the price is accurate, this would outdo the most expensive new car yet, the Rolls-Royce Sweptail of 2017, said to cost $13 million. The English custom kept " 30 to 40 designers, engineers, craftspeople, and testers" busy for four years.

Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse zooms into Jay Leno's Garage

Jay Leno's Garage very frequently features cars that are old, interesting and even low-tech. Two of those three have been thrown out the window (or out of the removable polycarbonate roof panel) for this episode, wherein our intrepid host puts the spurs to a 1200-horsepower Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse. (For those of you that have trouble keeping track of your Veyrons, that's the targa-topped one that costs about $2 million).
While Mr. Leno doesn't set any land speed record on the California interstate system, he does have a bit of fun taunting his camera car while giving us a very thorough walk-around of one of the most exotic new cars in the world today.
Scroll down to hear some big Bugatti turbos spinning.

Discover the two coupes Bugatti wanted to sell alongside the Chiron

Bugatti has released two cars since it joined the Volkswagen Group in 1998: the Veyron and the Chiron. Both are high-horsepower, multi-million-dollar machines built in strictly limited numbers. That wasn't the original plan; executives envisioned a three-car range during the 2010s. Autoblog went right to the source to discover a pair of coupes — one below the Chiron and one well above — that were cancelled and have never been seen before. The French company first attempted to revive the practice of coachbuilding in the 2000s, but it shifted nearly every part of the process in-house because a majority of the companies it worked with during the 1920s and the 1930s were long gone. While this added significant costs and complexity, the success of Lamborghini's few-off models (like the Reventon) proved collectors were ravenous for exclusivity and more than willing to pay a lot for it. "We were not sleeping on the horse. Starting in 2004, I was constantly giving management ideas about what we could do next to the Veyron, on its base, or after it. Most never saw the light of day," Achim Anscheidt, the soft-spoken head of Bugatti's design department, told me as we walked through the company's styling center. Bugatti Veyron Barchetta View 5 Photos With coachbuilders like Henri Binder, Park Ward, Kellner, and Figoni & Falaschi out of the picture, the task of creating a new body fell into Anscheidt's lap. While he experimented with many projects, one he shed light on is a barchetta-like open-top two-seater (shown above) based on the Veyron Grand Sport. It featured the short, boat-like wraparound windshield that has historically characterized the body style, though "it could have been done as a roadster with a conventional windshield." Its proportions are recognizably Veyron-like, but the similarities end there. Its front end wears a vertical lights and bigger grille flanked by wide air intakes, styling cues later seen on the Divo. If built, the Veyron Barchetta would have arrived as a limited-edition model with a correspondingly high price tag, in part to offset the sky-high development costs. But as Lamborghini chalked up hit after hit, including the Sesto Elemento introduced at the 2010 Paris show, Bugatti's top executives were reluctant to adopt this business model. "They couldn't give themselves the push to make it happen," Anscheidt said with a tinge of regret.