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It’s complicated: Watch a Bugatti Veyron get a $21,000 oil change

Here's a fascinating peek under the hood, or rather the rear carbon-fiber engine cover panel and undercarriage, that shows the complexity of getting a simple oil change for a Bugatti Veyron, courtesy of the folks at Royalty Exotic Cars. Servicing this Veyron Mansory Vivere owned by Houston Crosta costs an estimated $21,000. Jiffy Lube, eat your heart out. How complicated can it be, you ask? Well, the video is 20 minutes long — and that's with the benefit of plenty of editing to cut out the boring waiting-around and taking-things-apart parts. Crosta estimates the Veyron is held together by nearly 10,000 bolts, and a heck of a lot of them have to be removed. Changing the oil on one of the supercars starts with needing specialty GoJack car dollies to get underneath and hoist the lowered body high enough to get it on the shop's lift. Then, you have to remove the wheels on both sides, rear fender and carbon-fiber panel, carbon fiber wheel-well panels, the fuel filler ... and on and on and on. Also, where most modern cars have one or two drain plugs, the Veyron has 16. The mechanics managed to drain 16.5 quarts of oil from the quad-turbocharged 8.0-liter W16 engine. Rather do it yourself? Well, the mechanics estimate the difficulty of the oil change ranked a 20 on a 1-to-10 scale. At least for the first hour or so, until they managed to pry off the rear panel. Then it went to a 6, they say. "After everything's taken apart, some of this stuff is just plain and simple super easy," Crosta says. "But getting everything out to get to this point, that's a couple-day process." Interestingly, Royalty will let you rent out a Veyron Mansory Vivere for almost the same price as the oil change — $20,000 — for 24 hours of fun. Related Video: Image Credit: Royalty Exotic Cars Bugatti Coupe Luxury Racing Vehicles Supercars supercar oil change

Trial of man whose Bugatti Veyron went in the drink mysteriously delayed [w/video]

The mysterious case of the drowned Bugatti Veyron has taken another turn toward the strange.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's bring you up to speed: Andy House, who owns an exotic car repair shop called Performance Auto Sales, crashed his Veyron into a lagoon in Texas after allegedly being distracted by a low-flying pelican... or something. Naturally, House turned a claim into his insurance company for the totaled supercar to the tune of $2.2 million, which is likely more than the car is actually worth.
Shortly thereafter, video surfaced of the crash, with nary a distraction in sight. The next makes-you-go-hmm moment occured when reports surfaced of a new Veyron, along with a pair of Lamborghini coupes and a Porsche 911 GT3, landing in House's garage. The estimated cost of these supercars, according to Jalopnik, is $2.2 million. All of this made Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance Company's insurance fraud lawsuit in 2011 - two years after the incident - come as little surprise.

Watch (and listen to!) the Bugatti Bolide go flat-out on an airstrip

Development of the track-only Bugatti Bolide has reached a significant milestone. After finalizing the hypercar's design and building the first prototypes, the French brand has started testing the model on an airstrip to fine-tune parameters like the amount of downforce it generates. Power for the Bolide comes from an 8.0-liter W16 engine that's quad-turbocharged to 1,578 horsepower — you know we're talking serious power when the horsepower figure includes a comma. While this is the same basic engine that powers the Chiron, among other models, the major similarities between the two models stop there. Bugatti didn't design the Bolide for street use so its engineers were unfettered by the regulations that shaped your daily driver. They focused on keeping weight as low as possible while designers created a race car-like body. So far, the tests have confirmed what months of computer simulation predicted: the 3,200-pound Bolide can handle up to 2.5 Gs of lateral forces, meaning it can take a corner really, really, fast, and it generates up to three metric tons of downforce (that's about 6,600 pounds) depending on the speed it's traveling at. Bugatti explains the car's front splitter helps achieve this downforce: air hitting the car gets compressed under the splitter and expands under the diffuser to create the suction that helps pin the Bolide to the pavement. There's much more to it, and all of the aerodynamic add-ons are functional. The shape of the passenger compartment, which is narrow compared to the Chiron's, was selected in part to maximize airflow to the side-mounted intercoolers. The door mirrors channel air to the intercoolers as well. Bugatti Bolide testing on a track View 10 Photos While the mirrors add drag, Bugatti explained that they make more sense than cameras because they give the driver a better idea of where they're positioned compared to other cars. "Every technical consideration has been translated directly into an aesthetic design," said Frank Heyl, the company's deputy design director, in a statement. "Design and technology flow into one another in the Bolide," he added. Bugatti will continue testing the Bolide on race tracks around the world in the coming months, and it plans to begin delivering the car in 2024. If you're not already on the waiting list, it's too late: production is limited to 40 units and they're all spoken for in spite of a base price pegged at ˆ4 million (about $4.29 million at the current conversion rate).