Bugatti Veyron Successor to Arrive by 2012

"this car has gotten too much publicity which it doesn't deserve!" You summed it up quite nicely! To call it an "engineering masterpiece" is definitely an overstatement. I give that title to any car that can match or surpass it's performance with much less, both in cost and parts. I have to admit, the design has grown on me just slightly, but overall, I still think it's ugly. Imho, it serves as a representation of everything not to do in a supercar. 1) It doesn't look fast; in fact, it looks stationary from every angle. 2) An 8.0 liter quad-turbocharged W16 engine, for why? I don't see anything technologically advanced about it's exorbitant nature. 3) It's a title I don't believe Bugatti deserves, or has earned, irregardless of it's heritage. 4) It's the very idea itself: Luxury, air conditioning, all it's unnecessary excessive amenities. And that stupid grill is supposed to give it some sort of authenticity?

Rob, are you out of your mind? If you open the dictionary and look under "great automotive engineering" there's a picture of the Veyron. Just the fact that they made a 2500HP quad-turbo W-16 puts them so far past everyone else in the game. From an industry standpoint, the Veyron was worth the fuss just for giving us ion-current knock sensing. Wow, don't get me started. SO many engineering developments that you take for granted now were created JUST for this car.

No, Benz-Man, RobERob is absolutely right. Top speed of 250 mph with an 8L W16? How many cars have passed/come close to that speed with V8s and V10s that were much smaller? And yes. It IS the most disgusting car I've ever seen.

hahah if u knew anything about this car, you wouldn't say "endless amount of buttons to activate high speed mode"... i'm pretty sure that there's 3 keys for each mode, top speed, handling, and just cruising. aka you only put the right key into the key whole and the car automatically sets everything for u. haha comon now, your paying over 1.5 mil or even more for the car.

That's exactly what I was thinking. I believe there was somekind of accounting shift-around where the gap between production costs and retail price (+X amount more) was filed under VW. Either way, if I had that money, I doubt I would have bought this car. Nevertheless, I'm happy to hear there will be a successor.

Its not just the car the recieve money from, its other things too. Ferrari doesnt just make money off of its cars. Most of it profits come from people who wish they had a Ferrari. They sell t-shirts, shoes, cologne, and even expensive clocks i have seen in electronic stores. Bugatti does the same. Did u see the cologne on top gear?

And I quote: "The Bugatti development team of Dr. Franz-Joseph Paefgen and Dr. Wolfgang Schreiber state for 1000 HP propulsion power, the system demands approximately 2000 HP to be additionally generated as heat energy during combustion. Half in each case is dissipated in the exhaust gas and cooling water." In actuality, its somewhere between 2500-3000 HP. Most is lost as heat. This doesn't even account for the 10-20% lost in AWD. These HP numbers only matter when the power unit is spoken of as a separate entity.

you're forgetting the bugatti eb110...

benz_man when they talk about heat energy during combustion this is energy contained in the fuel not converted to mechanical energy. this energy is energy in the fuel and converted to heat energy and not mechanical energy outputted by the engine during the combustion reaction. internal combustion engines i think are only 20-something percent efficient at best. so the quoted figure of 1000hp is power (noting that power is the rate of doing work/energy) at the crank is correct. that means the total energy originally in the fuel and hence in the system (pretty much) is actually 5 times the mechanical energy at the crank.