Luxary Autos
	• Bugatti Veyron 16.4 • Bentley Continental GT • Aston Martin V8 Vantage

If you’ve been held prisoner by Columbian guerillas, overcome with dengue fever and been mostly unconscious in the jungle for the past couple years, it’s just possible you don’t know the operant numbers for the Bugatti Veyron 16.4. So let’s get this out of the way: sixteen cylinders, four turbos, seven speeds, four-wheel drive, 1001 horsepower, two-point-five seconds to sixty, 253 miles per hour, one million two hundred and fifty thousand smackaroos. More or less --Probably more.

 

Okay? Good. Now that we’ve taken care of that, lets move along.

 

There is, in endeavors of art and science, a desire to push beyond the current threshold and create something that redefines the craft. A new benchmark, a higher order, the ne plus ultra of whatever discipline engages us. It’s a natural and laudable human desire, and it forces everyone else to redefine their terms. It fosters advancement and evolution. In watches, it’s the orbiting 3-axis tourbillon. In high-end audio, it’s the Halcro and Chord amplifiers. In super-accurate rifles, it’s probably Dakota’s Longbow, or maybe the Sako. In series-production sports cars, it’s the Veyron. Love it or hate it, you can’t deny the performance and engineering smackdown this car has delivered to every other superexotic in production.

In a recent article, Gordon Murray – the “Ego from England” – takes time to diss the Veyron, while doing his usual “I’m a genius” schtick. He reminds us at every opportunity how wonderful his McLaren F1 was, what a big, fat, inefficient and expensive beast the Veyron has turned out to be, how he single-handedly saved the universe one evening with a box wrench and some ear swabs, and what a downright amazing guy he himself actually is. Perhaps old Gordo forgets that, A) he didn’t create the F1 all by his lonesome in a bunker somewhere, B) he had nothing to do with the engine of the McLaren, and C) when it came out, he had no qualms about charging a million bucks for it. So, too bad. The F1 was, and is, a great car. The Bugatti is a greater car. It delivers superior performance, and ten times the sheer engineering elegance of the F1. Deal with it, Murray.

 

In fact, an entire subculture of the Internet has emerged, devoted to the thumbs up/thumbs down debate on the Veyron (which is, by the way, pronounced “vay-raw.” And while we’re at it, guys, it’s not “guh-lardo,” it’s “guy-ardo.”) People seem either to laugh at the 16.4’s bombast and question the need for its very existence, or applaud the effort and lust after the thing. As for us, we lean toward the latter. Anything that evokes this much brouhaha, this much scrambling for superlatives, this much snarling passion and broken beer bottles, is just dandy by us.

And we love the passion that went into this thing. To build a car that gets to sixty in 2.5 seconds is, frankly, not that tough. To get a car that reaches beyond 250 mph is, likewise, not terribly difficult. But to build a certified, street-legal vehicle that does both, and handles corners like it has adamantium claws, and takes you to the bakery for scones on Sunday morning, and cossets you in sumptuous luxury – that’s a somewhat taller order. The Veyron fills that order on every count. Because the people who thought it up, designed and engineered it, were driven by their passions. You see signs of it everywhere. In the buttery leather that greets your hands, the burnished aluminum controls and machine-turned finishes. It’s in the jewelry of the thing, the polished snorkels that curve over the engine bay, the billet horse collar grill surround, the sculptural venturis and vortices of the body. There’s deep passion in that 8-liter W16 motor, with it’s Swiss-watch 64 valves and quartet of turbochargers. Just look at the mechanism of the rear wing, raising and swiveling on beautiful armatures to increase downforce or serve as an airbrake. (That’s right: this car has an air brake.) Passion – passion for driving, for engineering, for shapes, textures and sensations that make us smile.

 

The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 exists as an expression of human desire. The guys who built it did so because they could. Because it was their human nature to do so. They didn’t have to, they wanted to. And there it is, sitting there – human desire on four wheels.

 

So thanks, Bugatti. We’re glad you built the Veyron 16.4. Now, how about something we can actually own?

 

…if you have the support structure in place for this vehicle: armed guards, maximum-security garage, an oil field in your back yard, and your own private county to drive it in.

 

…honestly, we can’t think of a reason not to get this thing.