Gadgetory

when you make about the only car in the world that can impress people in Monaco around breakfast time and do the same thing in Salt Moritz at lunch the same day what do you do for an encore you take the top off let's drive the 2013 view Gatti Grand Sport Vitesse and check the tech in fact this is the halo car of halo cars back in 1998 Volkswagen bought up the rights to the bugatti auto brand name about all that was left of a storied French car maker that by then was better known for making aircraft landing gear probably holding up the last jet you flew but with this move VW set out to prove it's about more than just jaunty Jettas and failed Phaeton's and by 2001 they unveiled the Veyron this is its latest iteration not that you got a staff ten yards away from me and I'll still tell you this car is not exactly conventionally pretty to my eye but such as the tyranny of aerodynamics if you want to do 250 plus and stay on the surface of the earth you shape the car exactly as the wind tells you to and do it with a smile what's interesting is those who've taken this thing to the limit on the track with the top off always remarked how still it remains in the cabin the body is basically all carbon-fiber you can even order the car finished in a clear coat so everybody knows it it seats two in front of its massive mid-mounted engine and offers virtually no rear visibility you handle blind spots by driving away from them now when you build a car like this nothing about its routine it's kind of like one big rolling book of Bar trivia just at this one corner I could tell you stories for an hour these tires for example they're made to order because no other car uses them and they're about $25,000 a set and when you replace those every third time you're advised to replace the wheels as well pushing about 40 grand a set even these valve stems are unique extra strong springs in them because at 3,000 or so rpm on the wheel when you're at full tilt conventional valve stem Springs would open up and bleed out the tire not good at 200 plus when you do get a tune-up most of this outside bodywork has to come off to get to the spark plugs on those months your mortgage drops to number two in the budget now the specs of this car and particularly its engine have been breathlessly over covered by every blog and car magazine on earth so I'm not gonna kill you with that except to talk about the architecture of this guy this is an 8 litre quad turbo w16 the w16 part throws a lot of people here's what it means it's basically to kind of v8 that are both Siamese together sharing one crank I say kind of v8 because each of these two banks of 8 cylinders are sitting in a nested format that means they take up less longitudinal room when those two 8 cylinder banks are put together on one crank and that means much better packaging this engine would be substantially longer and more unwieldy and throw off the balance of this car if it was a traditional architecture the result 1,200 horsepower and 1100 and 6 foot pounds of torque yes both four figures I have never seen that in a car we've reviewed before that means this roughly forty four hundred pound vehicle it's quite dense gets up to 60 in a mere 2.6 seconds all of that thanks to a 7-speed dual-clutch transmission has been beefed up quite a bit for the additional power of this Vitesse going out to all-wheel drive there's no other way you could distribute that power otherwise mpg if you care is about 8:15 you don't care now inside this guy's frankly you've seen that's nightmare we don't have every tech option you can get navigation they don't make a big deal about it so you can imagine why instead it's a simple set of climate controls some basic radio and CD controls good old analog gauges that are real crisp and nicely placed there is an iPod connect this is relatively new for the Veyrons on a cool little retracting spool reel here why don't other car makers do that so here we go traffic in California's wine country and believe it or not this is not wasted footage because I've driven a lot of so-called super cards that have a very unsupervised very cantankerous sometimes at this level this car has impressed me with its ability to be docile and drive like a slush box when you want it to and then of course transfer all that power at other times when you want it to that's a pretty good trick it makes the most amazing sounds there's whirring there's growling there are these sounds like a medium caliber handgun going up those are the boost valves on the turbos releasing excess pressure now well this car has been clocked at 254 miles an hour with the top off it's actually only going to go there if you have a special mode on a high speed mode that limits the top speed into a mere 233 neither it's 0 to 16 or top speed or any other vector have much relevance on the street about the only icon of its prowess is that the windows automatically raised at 95 miles an hour which point you are still in second gear and wondering where that stretch of road went willing up in a Veyron creates an event in the space of 20 minutes I had one person offer rather seriously to trade me their child for it several beg to be allowed to sit in it dozens took their picture just near it and a few resentfully and clearly purposely ignored it people react because until that moment it was a myth and because of the price okay now the fun part let's put a price tag on our little orange friend base is around two and a quarter million dollars or roughly forty five years of the u.s. median income on top of that there's a fifty one thousand dollar destination charge because they air freight these things around via DHL not kidding sixty-four hundred dollar gas guzzler tax you don't care and about a two point six percent customs duty I bet you've never seen that on a car bill of sale before in the end this car is phenomenally expensive and you would look at its German engineering French manufacturer and Italian heritage and see a bar joke coming but this car most certainly is not one for its big company sophistication brutal yet controlled performance and cheeky open top design it really is a class of one