2008 Bugatti Veyron on 2040-cars

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Rembrandt signs off on the latest special edition Bugatti Vitesse

Remember when the Bugatti Veyron first came out? You'll have to go back the better part of a decade to 2005. People were taken aback by the million-dollar asking price. But now there are plenty of cars with price tags in the seven-figure range.
Pagani gets that much for the Huayra, as does McLaren for the P1 and Ferrari for LaFerrari. Aston Martin charged seven digits for the One-77, Hennessey charges that much for the Lotus-based Venom GT, Zenvo does for the ST1 and you can bet SSC will charge at least as much for the Tuatara. Suddenly the notion of a million-dollar supercar doesn't seem so absurd, does it?
$3 million - now that's another story, but that's just what Bugatti gets for the latest special edition Veyron you see here. The price for the "basic" Veyron inflated over the years, of course, and then went up with each iteration. The Grand Sport kicked it up a notch when it blew the roof off. The Super Sport that much more when it upped the power and the speed. Bugatti got that much more when it combined the best attributes of both to make the Vitesse roadster, and squeezes out just an extra little bit for each edition of its Legends series.

How an 18-cylinder engine and the Porsche 917 shaped the Bugatti Veyron

On the surface, Volkswagen's resurrection of Bugatti looks like one of the many chess-like moves made in its bold quest to expand its portfolio of brands during the late 1990s. In a way, it was; branching out into new segments motivated executives to buy a once-venerated French brand that hadn't made a car in years. On a secondary level, the acquisition allowed one man to fulfill his dream of developing the world's most prestigious car. Bugatti opened its archives to tell the story of how its first 21st-century car, the Veyron, was born.  Ferdinand Karl Piech (1937-2019), a brilliant engineer who rose to the top of the Volkswagen Group during a long and illustrious career, sketched out an 18-cylinder engine in 1997, on the back of an envelope, while riding the bullet train between Tokyo and Nagoya. It consisted of three VR6 cylinder banks separated by 60 degrees and tuned to deliver 555 horsepower. The 6.25-liter engine was naturally aspirated and envisioned for high-end luxury cars -- the kind that would make Mercedes-Benz (who also experimented with an 18-cylinder engine) blush. There was one big problem: Volkswagen Group didn't have a suitable car to put it in. Rolls-Royce would have been an option, but BMW unexpectedly ended up with the name (though not the factory nor the Spirit of Ecstasy) after a bitter bidding war. Although Volkswagen had bagged Bentley, Piech set his mind to buying the dormant Bugatti brand, which belonged to Italian entrepreneur Romano Artioli, after Piech's son gave him a model of a Type 57 SC Atlantic while vacationing in Majorca. He talked Volkswagen's financial department into clearing the funds needed to buy the brand right after he returned to Germany, and the transaction was completed in 1998. With an engine and a name, Piech set the ball rolling. Italidesign's Giorgetto Giugiaro designed the EB118 concept in a matter of months and presented it to the public at the 1998 edition of the Paris Auto Show. It arrived as a front-engined coupe powered by the Austrian engineer's 18-cylinder engine. Several concepts followed: the EB218 shown at the 1999 Geneva Motor Show explored what a Bugatti sedan could look like, the EB18/3 Chiron introduced that same year moved the brand in a sportier direction, and the EB18/4 Veyron brought the idea of a modern-day hypercar much closer to production. It's this design study that received the green light for production.

Race in a road rally | The List #0035

On this episode of The List, hosts Jessi Combs and Patrick McIntyre compete in The Great Race, a 2,000-mile road rally in which precision, not speed, is the key to victory. The race is a grueling test of endurance, restraint, and the ability to execute rigid instructions under extreme duress. The prize for first place? $50,000. Oh, and did we mention the competitor lineup consists exclusively of vintage cars? For each leg of the race, the point is not necessarily to come in first, but to arrive at your destination at a very specific, pre-determined time, down to the second. If you arrive at your destination when you're meant to, congratulations, you've aced that leg of the race! To do this, you need to be fantastic at following rules, instructions, and driving at a steady speed. "I am not good at following rules, I am not good at following instructions, I am not good at driving slow," says Jessi, pondering the requirements for success in the rally. However, regardless of confidence, our hosts set off from San Rafael, CA, in a 1927 Bugatti Type 35B on the first leg of the nine-day journey. A road trip of this length is difficult in the best of conditions, but being cramped together with another person in a two-seat, topless, slow-moving, 89-year-old car takes a special breed of human. Our hosts are up to the challenge, but the journey isn't without hardships. Will they be able to finish the race? Join us as we drive from California to Illinois to find out on this episode of The List! Click here to find more episodes of The List Click here to learn more about our hosts, Jessi and Patrick