The Bugatti Chiron: 1,479 Horsepower and the End of the W16 Era

The Bugatti Chiron makes 1,479 horsepower out of an 8.0-litre W16 running four turbochargers, plus 2,000 Newton-metres of torque. It weighs 1,995 kilograms, near enough two tonnes. It’ll do 0-60mph in 2.4 seconds, and the top end is electronically capped at 261mph because the tyres can’t safely contain what the engine will still happily give you past that point. De-restricted for one specific run in 2019, the Super Sport variant reached 304.773mph on a closed straight in Ehra-Lessien. Andy Wallace, factory test driver, was at the wheel. The run counts. The number is real.

This is what the end of an era looks like.

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The Engineering Case for the W16

Nobody set out to build a W16 for the romance of it. It exists because Volkswagen Group’s engineers, working the original Veyron project in the late 1990s, calculated what they needed and then worked backward until they had a shape for it.

A W16 is two narrow-angle V8s joined at the crankshaft. Each bank of four cylinders sits at 15 degrees from its neighbour, and the result is a block compact enough to sit in the Chiron’s mid-rear position. It measures 710mm wide, 720mm long, 597mm tall. It displaces 7,993cc. Four turbochargers, two spinning at low RPM and all four above 3,800 revs, arranged sequentially so none of the lag a conventional twin-turbo setup hands you down low ever arrives.

Cooling takes three radiators at the front, two at the sides, one for engine oil, one for the gearbox oil, one for the differential. Ten radiators in total. At maximum load the fuel system moves 60,000 litres an hour, which is a small swimming pool drained in 90 minutes.

No existing architecture could do what the Veyron demanded. So Volkswagen built a new one.

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What 2,000Nm Feels Like

No road car had made 2,000Nm of torque before the Chiron. Closest thing in production was the Veyron Super Sport at 1,500Nm. The Chiron cleared it by a third.

At that level, torque stops registering as acceleration. It’s closer to physics making an executive decision. Fifty miles an hour, second gear, a partial squeeze of throttle, and the sensation reorders whatever you thought engines were for. The car doesn’t surge. It translates.

0-60 is 2.4 seconds. 0-124mph (0-200 km/h) takes 6.1. 0-186mph (0-300 km/h) happens in under 14. A Porsche 992 Turbo S manages 0-60 in 2.6 seconds and calls itself fast, and the Chiron will be at 186mph in roughly the time that Turbo S needs to reach 60 for a third time.

The seven-speed dual-clutch swaps ratios in under 100 milliseconds. The all-wheel drive system puts the power down with no theatre attached. And the chassis stays so composed at speed that test drivers have described feeling underdressed for the occasion, the car calmer than the number suggests it has any right to be.

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The 304mph Run

On August 2, 2019, Bugatti and Michelin took a pre-production Chiron Super Sport 300+ to Volkswagen’s Ehra-Lessien test track and ran it to 304.773mph. The car had been massaged for aerodynamic efficiency: longer tail section, altered underbody, recalibrated engine mapping. Not a standard customer car. Close to one, though.

Guinness World Records declined to certify it, because the run went one direction only rather than the two-way average that cancels out wind assistance. Koenigsegg’s 277.87mph two-way average still stands as the official record. Bugatti never chased the paperwork. They didn’t need to.

The speed itself is documented. 304 miles per hour, in a derivative of a road car, on road tyres.

Michelin developed tyres specifically for the attempt, capable of surviving 5,100G of centrifugal force at the contact patch. Each wheel spun at 4,100 revolutions per minute. A standard production tyre comes apart catastrophically above 220mph, so Michelin built new ones.

Crossing 300mph was the W16’s last great act. Nothing with an internal combustion engine built primarily for the road has managed it since.

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The Mistral: The W16’s Final Chapter

In 2022 Bugatti announced the Mistral, a W16-powered roadster, open top, 1,600hp. It is the last car the company will ever build around that engine. Production runs to 99 units at $5 million apiece, and all 99 were spoken for before anybody outside the room had seen it.

It isn’t the fastest Bugatti. The Bolide, track-only, makes 1,825hp and weighs just 1,450kg. But the Mistral matters for what it stands for: the W16 signing off with the roof gone, wind pouring over that engine cover at 261mph, the last of something nobody is going to do again.

Bugatti’s next car, developed with Rimac, will be hybrid. Different architecture. The numbers will probably climb. The W16 won’t be in there anywhere.

Bugatti has confirmed it. The engine is done.

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Why the Chiron Is Not a Car You Love

The Veyron was a statement. The Chiron is a proof. There’s a distinction there.

You can love a Ferrari Enzo. You can have a relationship with a McLaren F1. Cars like that push back, they demand something from you, they talk to you through their imperfections.

The Chiron doesn’t do any of that. It’s too composed, too broad in its competence. At 150mph it’s as settled as a Porsche 911 at 60. Nothing is asked of the driver, because the engineering has pre-answered every question before you got there. No feedback loop. Only result.

That’s a characterisation rather than a criticism.

The Chiron is what happens when an engineering organisation treats a road car with the rigour usually reserved for aerospace hardware. The target was never an exciting car. The target was an irrefutable one. Gordon Murray would call the approach categorically wrong; his 50-year argument is that weight is the enemy of every other engineering goal, and a two-tonne road car spends its life compensating for that mass with technology layered on technology. Murray would point at the Chiron as the proof. Bugatti would say he’d asked the wrong question.

The W16 produced 1,479hp. It weighed two tonnes. It ran to 304mph. It made 2,000Nm from a standing start without fuss. It cost €3 million, and every one of the 500 built was bought before delivery.

You don’t love it. You acknowledge it.

That’s exactly what Bugatti intended.