Bugatti's Latest Veyron, Most Ridiculous Car on the Planet? 790
Wired has an amusing writeup that accurately captures the most recent ridiculous addition to Bugatti's automobile catalog. The $2.1 million Veyron sports over 1,000 horsepower, a 16-cylinder engine, and a top speed of 245 mph. The guilty conscience comes for free. "That same cash-filled briefcase could buy seven Ferrari 599s or every single 2009 model Mercedes. You could snap up a top-shelf Maybach and employ a chauffeur until well past the apocalypse. Hell, in this economy, $2.1 million is probably enough to make you a one-man special-interest group with some serious Washington clout."
Re:interesting fact (Score:3, Informative)
Bugatti Automobiles SAS is a subsidiary of Volkswagen, and is actually a new company founded in 2000. As far as I'm aware, none of the former Bugatti companies were ever associated with GM; even if they were, a subsidiary can certainly make cars distinct from its parent company if the corporate structure permits.
It's the ultimate halo car (Score:5, Informative)
The whole point of a halo car is to demonstrate engineering prowess and/or get PR for the company. It certainly worked; Bugatti went from being a maliase-y brand nobody had heard of, to a brand almost any 18 year old kid and any car enthusiast worth his salt knows about. It wouldn't surprise me if Bugatti make a big move into a (obviously lower) luxury market very soon, cashing in on the recognition they've earned.
Re:A bit overblown (Score:1, Informative)
airplanes don't turn on a dime with traction.
rocket cars don't turn, period.
Re:A bit overblown (Score:5, Informative)
Airplanes go pretty fast on asphalt actually. A typical commerical airliner takes off at about 200 mph and lands at 150-175. The Concorde took off at 250 mph. The shuttle is well over 200 at touchdown.
Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness (Score:5, Informative)
They also demonstrated the silliest thing about it, or any 200+ MPH car... It takes quite a while to get to those speeds. You may get 0-60 in 3 seconds, but the acceleration drops off rather rapidly. About the only place you can get a car like that up to speed *is* a test track with an enormous straight.
I think it must have been 8 miles or more because they commented that the far end was out of sight due to the Earth's curvature!
A guy tried driving a super-Ferrari (an Enzo, I think) like that here in Southern California a few years back. yeah, You guessed it. Mr. Supercar? Meet Mr. Telephone Pole. Sadly, the dumbass driving it survived.
Another show mentioned how fragile they are. When they are featured on a show or test track, supercar makers box them up like ancient relics and ship them there. Contrast to the episode with the McClaren SLK that was simply driven to the filming site from two countries away.
Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness (Score:5, Informative)
The Veyron does 0-100Km/h (approx. 0-61mph) in about 2.5 seconds. The McLaren F1 does the same in 3.2 seconds.
While the F1 is indeed an engineering marvel, and probably much more enjoyable to drive on a race track than the Veyron, it is clearly outclassed, though not surprisingly given the large age difference.
Re:Hell yeah! (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure where you got that it's supposed to be the fastest car on earth from. It's not -- it's supposed to be the fastest *road legal* car on earth.
In real units... (Score:5, Informative)
1000 horsepower is a lot of power.
Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness (Score:2, Informative)
I can testify to that. My car is right around 4 seconds 0-60. I can jump ahead of just about anyone up through about 120mph. Pushing through 140, it's pushing. I've only accelerated just through 150, but ran out of road. A lot of the high speed numbers are worthless, because they'll never be reached.
140mph is just a tad over my _cruising_ speed, mate. Stop thinking in terms of your idiotic US highway system. There are plenty of stretches in Europe where you can go this fast for quite a while.
Re:Guilty conscience? (Score:5, Informative)
You're full of shit. But hey, you sound like you know what you're talking about, so you must be right.
The Prius has about 90 pounds [cleangreencar.co.nz] of NiMH batteries in it. Those batteries are largely benign, so you could toss them into the trash if you wanted to with the rest of your refuse if they failed, but Toyota will pay you to recycle them.
Now, I think the "toxic manufacturing process" largely comes from the nickel that goes into the battery back. Now, I'm not sure how much of each cell is nickel, but I do know that your standard steel is about 10% nickel. Given that most of your standard vehicle is steel (and I'm sure the Bugatti is made of a ton of exotic materials like carbon fiber whose manufacture is more toxic than steel and can't be recycled like steel), and that the Veyron weighs about 1,000 pounds more than the Prius - even if the Prius battery was 100% nickel the nickel content of both cars would be similar.
Plus when you factor in that the lead-acid battery in the Prius is about half the size of your typical lead-acid battery, you cut the possible leakage of lead into the environment (which is much worse than nickel) in half.
I suspect that most of your assumptions about the toxicity of the Prius (and all other NiMH batteries) come from the widely debunked CNW "Dust to Dust" marketing study which claimed that the Prius alone was responsible for the widespread destruction of the area around a mine in Canada and that a Hummer (and thus a Veyron, apparently) is more environmentally friendly than a Prius.
I'll simply point you to this link: http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/is-the-prius-battery-toxic [terrapass.com] where in the comments the claims are quite easily refuted (see especially comment #8).
Re:Yeah but.... 1/4 the price alternative (Score:3, Informative)
$550,000, same 0-60 acceleration, MUCH higher top speed (420 mph/ 676 km/h) [softpedia.com]. So what if it isn't completely street-legal ... even if the cops bought a Veyron, they'd be eating your dust ...
Re:Guilty conscience? (Score:5, Informative)
I dare you to suck on the tailpipe of any internal combustion vehicle. Please have paramedics on standby before you do.
While cars are very clean these days and can in fact emit exhaust that is cleaner in some aspects than normal air, any claims of exhaust coming out cleaner than "city air" has to be taken with a grain of salt.
BTW, the fact that it is able to shut off half the engine at low speeds only points out the fact that the engine is grossly over sized and powered for those speeds. It would be far more efficient if it simply had half the cylinders to start with (but then it wouldn't be able to push to speeds of 245mph).
Re:It is not about the top speed... (Score:5, Informative)
Hate to tell ya, but you've got a flat 6 [wikipedia.org], not a V6, sitting behind you...
Re:If I ever see.. (Score:5, Informative)
There are two sets of costs: non-recurring and recurring. The non-recurring costs include all of the engineering effort, R&D, putting together the production facility, etc. The recurring costs are those that you incur for each unit produced.
I find it highly unlikely that the recurring costs are more than $2.1M for the car, unless it was made of solid iridium or something. (Annual production of iridium is something like 3 tons.) I wouldn't find it surprising at all, though, if Bugatti had sunk quite a bit of R&D money into developing the tech in the Veyron, and perhaps a bit of dough on the production facility.
Wikicars [wikicars.org] says this:
So far, the oldest article I've seen claiming these numbers is this one from early 2007 [blogspot.com]. By the end of 2006, fewer than 50 had been produced. If we assume this number applies to the first 50, then that means the total cost to that point was a cool £250million. Yow!
Since then, though, another 150 have been produced. I highly doubt that it cost another £750million. In fact, this article [autotrader.co.uk] points to most of the costs having been R&D costs with this quote:
That's 250 man-years. If you assume each engineer costs $250K/year for labor, benefits and overhead, that's $62.5M in labor costs developing the transmission alone. Throw in all the machine work and parts and everything else, and I'm sure you easily get up to $100M development costs on the transmission alone.
People keep throwing that £5 million per car number out there, but I seriously believe it's way out of date.
Re:Guilty conscience? (Score:5, Informative)
Bogus, debunked here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2186786/ [slate.com]
Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness (Score:5, Informative)
No... If acceleration is what you're after, at a fraction of the price, what you want is a Caterham 7 Superlight R500.
http://www.caterham.co.uk/assets/html/showroom/superlightr500.html [caterham.co.uk]
0-60mph 2.88 seconds
Power-to-weight 520bhp-per-tonne
Top Speed 150mph.
Under GBP40k.
I built its little brother (7RS150), with 0-60mph of 5 seconds, in my garage a couple of years ago. It's a very very very fun toy...
Re:Guilty conscience? (Score:5, Informative)
You and the grandparent are under a misapprehension. Generally the rich do not pay "duty" or "tax". Many of the people who buy this will be oil baron types from countries with no fuel tax. The type of people who "can afford it" are the type of people who pay almost nothing. Hell even Warren Buffet [google.com] (who pays 17% tax whilst his assistant pays 30%) and Bill Gates (Sr.) [pbs.org] have been campaigning against the unfairness of how little they pay.
Once again with feeling. Tax is for little people. Like you.
P.S. Actually an interesting thing about Warren Buffet's comments is that if you look through the Google search it seems this hasn't been reported much in mainstream media????
Re:Guilty conscience? (Score:1, Informative)
No, sorry. There is nothing inherently wrong with using resources you have amassed to get something to your advantage.
Enlighten yourself:
Egotism [wikipedia.org].
Altruism [wikipedia.org].
Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness (Score:5, Informative)
The McLaren F1 been discussed is not the race track version but rather the road legal super car built in the 90's in limited numbers.
Re:Hell yeah! (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure where you got the "fastest *road legal* car on earth", because the post that I was replying to didn't mention road or legal or even car.
But well, this is /. after all where we argue about pointless points (myself included).
I could mention that the Veyron appears to have been superseded as the fastest road legal car [wikipedia.org] a few years ago, but that would spoil all our fun.
broken window (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window#Fallacy_of_the_argument [wikipedia.org]
They could be employed doing something worthwhile, instead. Such talented people would certainly have jobs anyway, and might be filling important engineering roles that benefit society directly, that are otherwise wanting right at this moment.
The fastest production car... (Score:3, Informative)
The fastest production car is not the Bugatti, but the SSC Ultimate Aero TT. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastest_car
Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness (Score:2, Informative)
And all of them are in Germany, I take it? ;-)
Re:Bugatti brand (Score:3, Informative)
The Bugatti EB110 is horrible"? To give you an idea of just how "horrible" it was, the greatest driver ever (statistically) - Michael Schumacher - bought one himself, and drove it often. Plus, it was the progenitor of the Veyron's quad-turbo meme. And you were doing quite well, up to there ;-)
Re:Guilty conscience? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness (Score:3, Informative)
You haven't seen their Africa challenge, have you?
I think it is by far one of the best things that were ever shown on TV, on this planet!
(The north pole and the USA challenge are also very impressive, but not quite as funny.)
Re:Bugatti brand (Score:0, Informative)
Not to mention VW owns Lamboghini and Porsche. There's your "lower end" market covered there.
Re:Bugatti brand (Score:3, Informative)
Not to mention VW owns Lamboghini and Porsche. There's your "lower end" market covered there.
Porsche not (yet) and Lambo through Audi. Wouldn't we all want to humbly eat these scraps?
Re:Guilty conscience? (Score:5, Informative)
This is why forklift trucks run on gas, and why cars which have been adapted to run on gas are so much cleaner. Since the optimum mixture is somewhat lean, there is always a certain amount of excess oxygen in the exhaust and no carbon monoxide. On gas, the emissions are predominantly carbon dioxide and water.
Because the optimum mixture for petrol is somewhat rich, you get quite a lot of carbon monoxide and a certain amount of soot.
Re:Guilty conscience? (Score:3, Informative)
We're not arrogant. We're angry. Angry that such engineering talent went into solving a problem that didn't need to be solved instead of the very real problems that do need to be solved.
Well, the thing is that the new and expensive stuff they use in the Veyron will be available in "normal" cars down the road. To me, Veyron has two roles:
a) A piece of engineering art.
b) testbed for future technologies
First one goes without saying. And so does the second one. VW has spent A LOT of resources on coming up with new and better ways at making the Veyron. The have had to solve problems that were literally unheard of in other cars. And the thing is that those solutions will trickle down to cars that you and I will be driving in the future.
Take the Mercedes S-class for example. It's the car that gets the latest and greatest technologies Mercedes has developed, and it costs a lot of money. But those technologies then become available in other cars as well. But the first car to have that cutting edge technology is going to cost quite a bit. Like the Veyron does. As does the S-class. Those cars make those technologies more mainstream, and they can then be brought over to cheaper cars.
Besides, building the greatest car in the world is a positive thing in on itself, and for that I applaud VW.
Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness (Score:5, Informative)
isle of man, for instance, has no national speed limit.
fyi, they're part of GB.
Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness (Score:3, Informative)
No, the (toll) road from Florence to Milano is pretty good, too. And the road from Bordeaux to say, Poitiers - there are good stretches on that.
Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Guilty conscience? (Score:3, Informative)
The same company's R&D effort produced the VW 1l [wikipedia.org]
Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness (Score:1, Informative)
Check the new Top Gear where they put a Veyron against a McLaren F1.
The F1 leaves the Veyron standing off the mark and it takes quite a while for the Veyron to catch up and finally overtake...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgTXSqys_0o
Re:Guilty conscience? (Score:5, Informative)
Um, no. The Prius -- especially the 2010 which I bought -- accelerates well: you'll be swerving around a minivan or a Hummer full of kids before you swerve around me. And I have absolutely no problems keeping up with traffic on US interstates.
You're either terribly opinionated or you're reflecting on how some Prius drivers DRIVE their vehicles (as opposed to what the car is capable of). In fact, it is my experience that the SLOWEST cars, the ones that leave 20-car gaps in front of them in heavy traffic and go 30 MPH on merging ramps, are non-hybrid cars being driven by people who evidently are trying to get hybrid mileage out of them. (Or who got a manual transmission and hate it.)
Yep, you can drive a Prius 70-80 and still be getting 40 MPG.
Re:Guilty conscience? (Score:5, Informative)
That is false. Actually, as a percentage of income, the middle class is the worst. The poor give away between 4 and 5%, the rich between 3 and 4%. The middle class gives much less than either. Unfortunately, all classes are starkly divided along the lines of givers and nongivers. While the average poor person is much more likely to be a nongiver, the averages are "fixed" by the one-in-four poor person who gives with extraordinary generosity.
This will be unpopular here, but the fact is that the group that gives the most is religious conservatives (disclaimer: I am religious but not conservative). And before anyone tries to negate the giving of the religious because a lot of that money is tithes, etc., understand that religious conservative people are actually more likely to give to secular charities than secular people, despite the fact that secular households earn about 16% more on average than religious households.
Re:Top Gear Veyron goodness (Score:3, Informative)
For the record, Ehra-Lessien's main straight is exactly 9 kilometers in length.
Re:Yeah but.... 1/4 the price alternative (Score:3, Informative)
1000+HP for how long? A few seconds? (Score:4, Informative)
I wouldn't want to ride in a Buick Grand National doing over 200MPH. Seriously, that car is based on the Buick Regal, a car designed for the regular driving public to drive around town at "normal" speeds. It'd probably be quite dangerous at anything north of 140. The factory did no optimization of the aerodynamics or the suspension for those kinds of speeds.
Furthermore, the car in the video is modified within an inch of its life. You'll notice that there aren't even any air filters on the turbo intakes, and it sounds like there isn't much of an exhaust system. Also, chances are good that the drivetrain would self destruct pretty rapidly if the maximum power output was achieved for more than a few seconds.
The Veyron, on the other hand, can hold its maximum speed until the tires self destruct (about 14 minutes, I think), and it can be driven in traffic without worrying about dirt damaging the engine, or having to yell over the sound of the engine. If someone made tires that would survive longer at those speeds you'd only be limited by the length of the road and the fuel tank capacity. Still, wouldn't it be cheaper to buy into something like Netjets if you need to get somewhere that fast?
The Buick Grand National was a neat car for its time (with a whopping, what 245HP stock?), and people have gotten impressive power and fuel economy out of them, but it's not really comparable to the Veyron.
Re:Yeah but.... 1/4 the price alternative (Score:4, Informative)
You may not be able to outrun radio waves, but you can outrun the response to radio waves.
I was pulled over racing against an imported http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_911_GT3 [wikipedia.org] that the driver claimed he had personally done 190 MPH in. This was on I-75 near Tampa. Police Interceptors only go 140 MPH. Not only that they would have to accelerate up to speed to catch you. At 190 MPH you are going faster than 3 miles a min which also means you're going faster than 1 mile every 20 seconds. Exits on I-75 are about every 3 miles. So the officer would have to radio a head, then the responding officer would have to get in position. Also the officers aren't going to pit you at that speed nor try anything else to stop you since it would be to dangerous. At that speed they'll pretty much leave you alone, they may try and get your plates but other than that there isn't much they can do.
In Atlanta they operate Bell 206B Jet Ranger's for their helicopters, they only have a Top Speed of 220 MPH so the Bugatti would even be able to outrun the aerial pursuit.
Re:If I ever see.. (Score:3, Informative)
Until the Veyron, they pretty much just made concept cars.