Mate Rimac built his name creating electric supercars like the Nevera. For Bugatti, though, an EV would be too "mainstream.", the 273-mph all-wheel drive hypercar powered by an 8.0-liter, quad-turbo W-16 internal combustion engine that in its most extreme iteration develops 1578 horsepower. Mate Rimac was, after all, the creator of the world’s fastest electric car, the 1,914-hpEveryone expected your first Bugatti to be an EV.
“Before I came to Bugatti, the business plan was to make an electric coupe SUV type of thing. That would be the easiest thing for us because we had the Nevera, and you could very easily and very convincingly make a Bugatti out of it. But I thought that would be wrong for the brand. I wanted to develop a new car. Luckily, I won that argument, which was three years ago, when electrification was still all the rage. It isn't anymore.”“When we started to develop the Nevera in 2016, EVs were cool.
“We do have a market for the Nevera. We have already delivered 140 cars out of a total planned volume of 150. But it is much harder to sell than a Bugatti. If we did the new Bugatti as an electric vehicle, we would sell more of them because of the brand, but nowhere near as many as we will sell with the V-16.”“There were some components I didn’t even know existed! The new Bugatti is not an electric car, but it’s not a combustion car, either.
"You could achieve the power figures that we have in the V-16 with a very highly turbocharged V-8, but the combustion engine had to be special. A Bugatti powertrain can't be something other people have.”, which is the open top car based on the W-16 platform. The successor to the Chiron is completely new; there’s not one piece from the Chiron or the Nevera.
“The exterior design is an evolution of the Chiron, but the interior and the technical elements are going up a level. To continue the watchmaking analogy: Even with watches that don’t have a transparent back, you know everything is beautiful inside because it's done with precision and good quality, even if you don't see it. And that's what I wanted to do with the new Bugatti.