Cars that Defied the Norm: Bugatti Veyron

And it produced 553 horsepower, also appropriate for a Bugatti in 1991. But Bugatti's new owners grew overly ambitious, and stretched company finances too thin, causing a collapse in 1995. So Volkswagen acquired the name in 1998, and thus began what is by far the most successful revival of the company. Its first concept was the EB118, which was powered by an 18-cylinder engine with the cylinders arranged into three banks of six. For the actual production car, which would debut in 2005, Bugatti went a slightly different route. The engine ended up being a W16, essentially to narrow-angle V8s sharing a common crankshaft.

Like the EB110, this used four turbochargers, and the result was the famous 1,001 horsepower rating. This rating is metric, and would be 987bhp, but it turns out to have been conservative anyway, and dyno tests have shown the car to actually produce 1,020/1,006 horsepower. Just so we're all clear. When the car debuted in 2005, it was the fastest, most powerful and most expensive production car the world had ever seen. It could hit 60mph in 3 seconds and 180mph in 14 seconds. The officially recorded top speed is 253mph, making it the car to dethrone the McLaren F1 as the world's fastest production car.

Special tires had to be made by Michelin just for the Veyron and its insane top speed. These tires cost $25,000 a set and can only be mounted on the rim at the Bugatti factory in France, a service which costs an additional $70,000. The car is named for Pierre Veyron, a Bugatti engineer, test driver and racing driver who was one of the two drivers to pilot a Bugatti Type 57S to a win at the 1939 24 Hours of Le Mans. And that right there tells you why the name Bugatti has had such an enduring legacy. When a car is designed, tested and raced all by the same person, it's easy to see why it turned out so brilliantly.

The Veyron was designed primarily with aerodynamics in mind, as such terrific top speeds couldn't be achieved without a maniacal attention paid to every little curve. Some people find this design rather beautiful, others not so much, and even those who like it by this point have seen enough pictures of it over the last eight years that they could draw it blindfolded. This familiarity might have even bred a certain amount of the proverbial contempt, and it is certainly easy to forget what an awesome technological achievement the Veyron still is. The real accomplishment isn't the horsepower figure itself either, it's that they have made this kind of power usable and reliable.