“When I came in, I think that a lot of people were scared that the [next Bugatti] would be electric or that it would be digitalized. It’s quite the opposite,” Bugatti CEO Mate Rimac said with a smile. Unveiled in Molsheim, France at the company’s historic headquarters last month, takes the torch from with an 1,800-horsepower plug-in hybrid system built around an 8.
3-liter V16. While it looks like the logical next step for the brand, the new Bugatti could have been a totally different car without sixteen cylinders to its name. “We were thinking about whether to make a luxury car.
Any type of option was on the table,” Rimac said. Bugatti could have veered toward luxury-car territory without straying far from its heritage. Today it’s primarily known for building with four-digit horsepower figures, but its resume of historic models includes a 252-inch-long, 12.
8-liter straight-eight-powered limousine named Type 41 that made a Rolls-Royce look like a Model T when it broke cover in 1926. Executives ultimately decided to extend the brand’s hypercar lineage by developing a successor to the Chiron. “Bugatti is about pushing boundaries so it has to have a hypercar,” Rimac reasoned.
The next point his team needed to address was the powertrain. Here again, the company had several choices: electric, hybrid, and non-electrified. Rimac’s expertise lies in batteries and motors, not complicated valvetrains and pistons, so many fearfully assumed that whatever came after t.