Bugatti is about to increase Veyron production. Tim Pollard asks, why bother?
So Bugatti is stepping up Veyron production from 60 cars built in its first year to around 75 annually. ‘We want to shorten the waiting time from just over a year,’ chirps a spokesman. I bet they do. At the current rate of five dozen Veyrons a year, it’ll be 2011 before they’ve finished building the last W16-powered behemoths, the fastest series production car the world has seen. And the good folk of Chateau Saint Jean, Molsheim, must be scared rigid that Brussels suits will have killed off 574g/km supercars by then.
Worldwide, Bugatti has delivered just 78 Veyrons to customers, and it has an order bank of 80 cars on its books (a year’s production). The current plan is for a production run of 300 Veyrons, and there are few signs yet that the super-Bug will go the same way as the Jaguar XJ220 and other supercars of the twentieth century that never quite hit their targets.
But can the Veyron survive until the next decade with no changes? Surely Bugatti will be tempted to hone its landmark supercar, tinkering with engineering upgrades and equipment levels. Not to mention price. ‘There are no plans at present,’ says the official, defensively. He won’t rule it out, though. But then when your only product costs the best part of £900,000, neither would you…