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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

2012 Pebble Beach Concept Car Lawn offers a tutorial in cars to come

The Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance is a showcase for some of the world's most exquisite vintage vehicles, but if newer metal is more your speed, the Concept Car Lawn is the place to be.
This year saw models from Bugatti, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, McLaren and Bentley as well as SRT, Hennessey, Infiniti and Lexus among others. The ultimate sampler platter of exotic and concept vehicles saw the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse mingle with the Lamborghini Urus Concept and the mighty Hennessey Venom GT, though we found ourselves particularly smitten with the BMW Zagato Roadster and the Aston Martin Vanquish.
Not that we could go wrong anywhere we looked. The 2013 Bentley Continental GT Speed seemed perfectly content parked on the manicured putting green, as did the McLaren MP4-12C Spider. Get cozy with the full gallery below to see the smattering of metal on the lawn.

1,600-hp Bugatti Mistral roadster marks the end of the line for the W16 engine

Bugatti's mighty W16 engine will retire in the coming years, but it's not sailing off into the sunset quietly. It will power one final street-legal car: a roadster named Mistral that stands proud as the first convertible of the Chiron era. Built due to customer demand, the Bugatti Mistral is a striking, limited-edition model that looks ready to add another speed record to the French firm's trophy case. I sat down with some of the people who created it, including Bugatti design director Achim Anscheidt and head of design Frank Heyl, to get the droptop's full story. "For the final road-going appearance of Bugatti’s legendary W16 engine, we knew we had to create a roadster. Well over 40% of all Bugatti vehicles ever created have been open-top in design," said Bugatti-Rimac CEO Mate Rimac. Heyl added that customers "begged" Bugatti to create a Chiron-derived convertible, and that granting them this wish was a "bucket-list" item for the members of his team. Power for the Mistral comes from the same 8.0-liter, quad-turbocharged 16-cylinder engine that propelled the Chiron Super Sport 300+ to a record-breaking 304.773 mph in 2019. It's rated at 1,600 horsepower, and it spins the four wheels via a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission. Bugatti estimates that the Mistral's top speed will check in at approximately 261 mph (420 kph). Will this number get verified? Hell, yes! "There can only be one goal in mind: to become the fastest roadster in the world once more," Bugatti pledged in a statement. While the Mistral is Chiron-based, Bugatti made several important structural changes to offset the inevitable loss of structural rigidity caused by chopping off the roof. Heyl explained that the monocoque's sills and transmission tunnel were reinforced and that the a- and b-pillar structures are new, though the front crash structure is the same. And, the two models intentionally share no exterior styling cues. "We had the pressure of creating something that is precious and valuable in a car collector's garage. It's not just a fashion statement: 'Oh, let's do a roadster!' Or, even worse, 'Let's take a Chiron and just cut it open,' which would have looked terrible. This burdens us with the responsibility that this is the last of its kind of that generation and how that's going to sit in those collections," Anscheidt told Autoblog.