After building the fastest and the most expensive cars, building a practical car might be the ultimate challenge for Bugatti.
Hot off the heels of their incredible Geneva release of the La Voiture Noire (“the black car” in French), Bugatti boss Stephan Winkelmann hinted that Bugatti may look to enter a very different market segment. While the one-off, $18.9 million La Voiture Noire – the most expensive new car in history – was still drawing oohs and ahhs from those surrounding its display, Winkelmann was chatting it up with Automotive News Europe.
In the interview, he states that, after developing a string of increasingly fast cars with exorbitant prices to match, the next project for Bugatti might go 180 degrees in the opposite direction. He’s thinking electrification – and not a performance hybrid system, like many of the other luxury sports car manufacturers were displaying at Geneva.
“I would see us doing a battery electric vehicle. There, the balance between performance and comfort is much more important, and it’s about daily usability. This is what I see,” said Winkelmann.
This may seem like an odd direction for the company to make, but it makes sense to us. Bugatti’s customer data is very different from what you’d see at Chevrolet or Ford. The average Bugatti owner has 42 cars, two of which are Bugattis. More than half of the Chirons sold were bought sight unseen – an impressive feat for any car, let alone one that cost $3 million.
Perhaps Bugatti realizes that most of their customers don’t actually use their cars. After building the fastest and most expensive cars, the next challenge may indeed be to build the best car that can actually be used as one.
What that means to us is that Bugatti is intending to build a comfortable, luxurious, top-of-the-line daily driver, allowing its existing hypercar customers to enjoy at least some of what Bugatti has to offer on a daily basis.
Source: Automotive News Europe
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