The $5.5-million Bugatti Tourbillon with butterfly doors.Courtesy of manufacturer
The recently unveiled Bugatti Tourbillon is a car, yes, but more accurately it’s the French company’s latest multimillion-dollar plaything for the ultrarich, and an absolute must-have accessory for next summer in Monaco. A new Bugatti, like any new trophy car, always makes big waves in a tiny automotive pond, but the Tourbillon should have auto industry executives around the world stopping and taking notes. That’s because it’s the first Bugatti to be introduced by Mate Rimac, electric vehicle savant and the company’s unlikely chief executive officer.
While other companies may not be able replicate the Bugatti’s 1,800-horsepower naturally aspirated V16 hybrid engine, its milled-crystal centre console, its $5.5-million price tag or its 3-D-printed suspension components that deserve a place in the Louvre, other brands can replicate some of Rimac’s priorities, design decisions and keen awareness of what makes cars fun. (Hint: It’s not about being the fastest or quickest, a lesson that’s especially poignant for Bugatti, which built its reputation on bloated supercars that aim for exactly those superlatives.)
What makes Rimac different from your usual C-suite automotive exec is that he’s an inveterate car geek. He got his start building an EV in his garage in Croatia and posting homemade drift videos to YouTube. Today, 14 years later, Rimac arguably runs the most prestigious automaker in the world, Bugatti, alongside his own electric supercar company, Rimac Automobili, and has a growing battery pack manufacturing company that recently signed a major deal with BMW. Still, Rimac never looks totally comfortable in a suit.
The $5.5-million Bugatti Tourbillon has a 1,800-horsepower naturally aspirated V16 hybrid engine.Courtesy of manufacturer
“That CEO is the dopest CEO you could ever wish for as a car enthusiast,” wrote one YouTube commenter, to which 12,000 other viewers gave a thumbs-up, under a video of Rimac introducing the new Bugatti and explaining what makes it special.
The Tourbillon is what happens when a car geek who’s obsessive about engineering makes a car from scratch. It gets so many things right by flying in the face of big automotive trends.
For example, where other brands keep adding more screens to their sporty cars – Ferrari, Lamborghini, BMW, I’m looking at you – Rimac did the opposite. The Tourbillon has a single small screen that folds away under the dashboard and is only for the backup camera and Apple CarPlay.
“The car is very analogue,” he said while unveiling the Tourbillon to Top Gear magazine. “We wanted to be able to run the car without any screen. Basically, the screen pops out if you want it.”
Rimac also dislikes the “horrible fake exhaust pipes” that have become a design trend seen on everything from Fords to Audis to Rolls-Royces. (See also: fake air vents.) Such deception is bad design, and liable to make people wonder where else a car company has cut corners.
Similarly, when I spoke to Rimac earlier this year, he railed against yoke-shaped steering wheels, carpets that slide around, door handles that pinch your fingers and low-quality buttons. Little details like these are important to get right, at every price point, but too many car companies overlook them.
The most obvious sign of Rimac’s keen sense of what enthusiasts want is Bugatti’s new engine. For the Tourbillon, Rimac told Top Gear he wanted an “emotional” engine that sounded great. He didn’t say the most powerful or biggest engine; that wasn’t the point.
The interior of the Bugatti Tourbillon. Notice there is no screen. One pops up for the backup camera and Apple CarPlay.Courtesy of manufacturer
“For me, emotion is a naturally aspirated engine,” Rimac said.
“You simply cannot beat the driving experience of a big, normally aspirated high-revving engine. The throttle response is so instantaneous. The noise is so glorious,” Rimac continued in a short rant that sounded less like a car company CEO and more like your average car enthusiast. You’ll find the same sentiment all over social media.
While other performance cars downsize and turbocharge their combustion engines to meet emissions targets (going from V10s and V8s to turbocharged V8s, inline sixes and inline fours), Bugatti did the opposite. Rimac called British racing-engine specialist Cosworth and asked it to build a naturally aspirated monster: an 8.3-litre V16 that revs to more than 9,000 revolutions per minute. It would have been much cheaper for the company to reuse its existing quad-turbo W16, but nope.
“We were crazy enough to develop a completely new combustion engine in this day and age. Opposite of downsizing, this is actually a bigger displacement [than Bugatti’s previous engine],” he told CarWow.
Such an engine was possible only because it’s paired with three electric motors and a relatively large (for a hybrid) 24.8-kilowatt-hour battery. It offers 800 horsepower and roughly 60 kilometres of electric range.
“When you have a combustion engine with a hybrid system, why then also make the combustion engine boring with turbocharging?” Rimac asked rhetorically in the CarWow interview. No more boring engines – that’s an idea we can all get behind. Another car company could, in theory, build a similar powertrain on a smaller, more affordable and less powerful scale.
The fact he went with a combustion engine at all is a pleasant surprise. Given Rimac’s fondness for EVs and the fact his other company already makes a 2,000-horsepower electric supercar, there was pressure from the corporate overlords at Volkswagen AG for the new Bugatti to be electric. (Porsche, and by extension VW Group, owns 45 per cent of the automaker Bugatti Rimac.)
“There was lots of pressure to go electric,” Rimac told CarWow. It would have been easy, he explained, to put a new body on the existing Rimac Nevera electric supercar and call it a Bugatti. “But I just thought it was the wrong thing [to do],” he said.
He’s right. Repurposing an existing car would’ve killed Bugatti’s appeal, and nobody would be writing anything nice about it.
Before wrapping up his walkaround of Bugatti’s new supercar, Rimac took time to point out the hinges on the Tourbillon’s front trunk, which are beautifully machined and anodized aluminum. “I’m a bit of a hinge fanatic,” he said to Top Gear. Car geeks love a good bit of mechanical engineering.
I don’t know about you, but in my next car I’d rather have nicely finished and satisfyingly smooth trunk hinges than an extra screen or fake exhaust pipes.
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Matt Bubbers