What kind of car can only be produced one per week?

The Veyron is a short,curvy two-seater with massive power. Its 1,001 horsepower engine has four turbochargers. The car's features sound like those on a jet: diffuser flaps, air-intake scoops, a tail wing that acts like an airbrake and 1.7 miles of cable to power onboard electronics.

Bugatti, owned by Volkswagen, can only produce one Veyron per week in its newly built factory in France, and will only produce the two-tone vehicle when one is ordered. The company will also stop when it hits 300 orders.

Bugatti has sold 45 Veyrons so far, the majority in the United States, said Georges Keller, Bugatti's head of communications

Source

More on the Bugatti Veyron from the New York Times

A 1,001-horsepower two-seater that blasts to 60 miles an hour in 2.5 seconds - and continues pulling all the way to 253 m.p.h. - the car is a sheer technological wonder.
----
Slightly less than 176 inches long (no longer than a Kia Spectra) and almost 79 inches wide, it is surprisingly compact. Most of the space inside seems to be occupied by an enormous 16-cylinder engine, a seven-speed transaxle and an all-wheel-drive system. Ten radiators are required to disperse all the heat the Veyron's mechanical systems generate.
----
The car's everyday top speed of 234 m.p.h. is enough to make it a king of the road. To be the performance emperor, though, the driver must resort to a second ignition key to the left of his seat.

The key functions only when the vehicle is at a stop. A checklist then establishes whether the car - and its driver - are ready to go for the maximum speed beyond 250 m.p.h. If all systems are go, the rear spoiler retracts, the front air diffusers close and the ground clearance, normally 4.9 inches, drops to 2.6 inches.
----
o appreciate the Veyron's performance extremes, ride along with Pierre-Henri Raphanel, a former professional racer who demonstrates the car to potential buyers.

Mr. Raphanel looks relaxed as he blasts the Veyron to almost 180 m.p.h. Other traffic and roadside objects appear and vanish in a blurred, real-life re-enactment of a computer game before he eases off.

When the freeway empties, Mr. Raphanel demonstrates the Veyron's brakes. The car's speed simply vanishes - braking to a stop from 250 m.p.h. takes less than 10 seconds, he said - but for the passenger, there is an equally astonishing experience: the driver is holding both hands in the air and wearing a big grin. The car has stopped in a straight line with no corrections at the steering wheel. If anything, the giant carbon-ceramic brakes and the rear air brake are more impressive than the acceleration.
----
9 miles per gallon in the city and 18 highway, according to preliminary E.P.A. estimates.
----
four turbochargers, 8-liters, 16-cylinders, 1,001 horsepower, 922 pound-feet of 0torque,4 wheel drive, seven-speed automated manual (?)gearbox, weight - 4,162 pounds, staggering acceleration: from zero to 125 miles an hour in 7.3 seconds and to 250 in 55.6 seconds, according to Bugatti, price - $1.2 million in the United States, before taxes.

Thanx Kelleygirl and DG. Of course good answer, I wish a Bugatti Veyron to every members of AP for 2006.


OOOps impossible they'll stop after 300!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Mozart,

At only 9 miles per gallon? You are kidding!
My Peugeot 407 does 50 mpg urban and 70 mpg motorways.

[Quote from the NYT above] " When the freeway empties..." Don't they have speed limits on freeways any more or do Veyron drivers assume, corectly, that no police vehicle can catch them ?

"Venturing onto the highways here, near Bugatti's headquarters in the Alsace region of France..."

You are in a better position to answer your question that I am , Fred. Maybe they slipped into Germany.

Ah, got it It was the word 'freeway' that deceived me. Autoroute or autobahn maybe, but freeway ?
Yes there is still no speed limit on an autobahn. The subject is up for debate again but nothing will happen. In France the limit is 130 kph on an autoroute and the penalty for exceeding the limit by a large amount is severe. That's not to be risked in a car that does not just 130 kph but about 400

I assume that the author of the piece I linked to resides in the US. "Freeway" and "highway" are used to denote limited access roads with (usually) high speed limits. "Interstate" highways link states, except in Hawaii, which has at least one imterstate, but no interstate automotive travel. Alaska also has Interstates.

Map of major US Interstate Highways

Map showing major US Interstates and other major highways.

Note: Neither map can show all the Interstate highways. There are several circling every major city that serve to bypass the city for those traveling through. KK and NerdQueenDeluxe could give you better information about Interstates.

The Interstate highways are properly known as the Eisenhower Interstate System of highways.It was President Eisenhower, in the 1950s, that created the basic system. Eisenhower, as a young officer (West Point 1915), was given the assignment to travel across the United States to determine the military's ability to move men and materiel across the country. Eisenhower discovered, basically, that "You can't get there from here." (This was about 1920 or so.) There were few good roads once out of a major city, and in many places there were no roads. Years later, when he became President, he remembered the problems that trip showed, and one of his main objectives was to make travel easier from coast to coast for the military*. (He also realized that the railroad system could be taken out by just a few strategic bombs in a few cities where almost every cross-country train pass through.) While any American who regularly travels on an Interstate in or near a major city knows that the system is almost universally underplanned, it is still a remarkable system. If one had a large enough gas tank, food, and a few other necessities, it is possible to travel from New York to Los Angeles (2843) with an average speed of over 70 mph.

* The idea that X amount of miles per every Y miles had to be flat and straight so that airplanes could land on them in an emergency is an Urban Myth. I spent days tracking that one down.

Interesting, DG. By that time, the 1950s, Eisenhower had also seen the autobahnen at first hand. The first of those had been started in 1928 and by 1939 the country had a complete network. Their benefits to the military were, and always had been, self-evident.

It is still an experience to drive on an autobahn at night;it makes us old Francophiles nostalgic for the days when French autoroutes had no limits. To be cruising at 110 mph or so in the dark and have something flash past at 170 + is quite a novelty for us nowadays

Fred, you may be able to help me understand something. In the US, the Interstaes require repair every few years. Theses repairs have nothing to do with new on/off ramps, adding a lane, or even re-routing. They are just that, repairs from damage done by wear, age, and the elements. What is this situation with autobahnen with reagrd to such repairs?

Oh, by the way, I am fairly certain that the word "freeway" came about to differentiate those roads from toll roads. Many of the early roads in the US were toll roads. There are still a few, and there is some movement to change some existing freeways to toll roads to "pay for reapirs." ( Like anyone believes that charging a toll will in any way reduce any tax aimed at road use.)

quote:

Originally posted by DorianGreyed:
Fred, you may be able to help me understand something. In the US, the Interstaes require repair every few years. Theses repairs have nothing to do with new on/off ramps, adding a lane, or even re-routing. They are just that, repairs from damage done by wear, age, and the elements. What is this situation with autobahnen with reagrd to such repairs?

From memory : a lot of the original ones were concrete, as were so many roads built in the 1930s but they have all been tarmacadamed since.Later ones , of course, were built to the current standards of the day. Can't say as I've noticed any exceptional rate of repairs on them. Modern surfaces do seem to be much more hard wearing than those of twenty or thirty years ago (and evidently much better than in the 1930s, when the joke in England was " Q. What is the difference between the roads built by the Romans and modern ones ? A. The Roman roads have lasted until today!") When repairs are undertaken they generally involve closing one lane (of six ) over a short distance. To the annoyance of drivers who drive for pleasure, not work,almost all such repairs are set for holiday times, particularly in Summer, and weekends (particularly at night). Such drivers are not much appeased by the fact that the roads then carry only a tiny fraction of the traffic they do at other times

The great road building in modern France has been of toll roads, though I believe that the plan originally was to gradually phase out the tolls over time once the builders had been paid enough. As it stands the tolls do pay for the upkeep and, certainly in our region, the construction of improvements such as new access roads, as the need arises. Each autoroute or stretch of autoroute is run by its own company which exists just for that purpose so, yes, the monies are spent on the roads, all under the watchful eye of the central government.