BUGATTI EB218, 1998
It’s so tough buying a car company... you have to feel for these mega corporations that go round hoovering the things up like they’re football cards. There’s all that pressure, especially if you get yourself a historical one.
Take Volkswagen, for example. Went on an absolute bender in 1998, snapping up Bentley and Lamborghini as well as Bugatti. It was led at the time by megalomaniac chairman Ferdinand Piëch, a details-obsessed engineer and member of the Porsche family who had a vision for making Volkswagen the largest carmaker in the world. He wanted to cover all bases, and Bugatti was intended to be the star on the top of the Christmas tree.
But what on earth would the maker of the people’s car want with a storied French purveyor of fine high-performance luxury beasts and at one point a train? (Make a coffee and look up the Autorail Bugatti, it’s a treat.) Can’t have had anything other than world domination in mind. And of course VW straight away set about fretting what to do with Bugatti.
The answer was this four-door concept from the 1999 Geneva show, with a scary 6.2-litre 18cyl engine under its capacious bonnet, an oddball W formation made up of three banks of six cylinders. It produced 547bhp, good for 0–62mph in about 4.5secs and a restricted 155mph top speed.
It’s beautiful inside the EB218 – like a soft play area for billionaires. Every surface has some level of squish, and what isn’t plush or stuffed is covered in walnut and shiny metal. It’s a very classical design inside, with nothing to offend the sensibilities – four seats and plenty of luxury. Likewise the 18in alloys are a true delight to behold – and made from magnesium, no less. There’s permanent four-wheel drive and multilink suspension to keep the drive tidy, and aluminium spaceframe tech to make sure the weight was restricted to a manageable two tonnes... or thereabouts.
This level of imagination is as ambitious as we’ve seen so far in Bugatti’s VW era. The ultimate answer to Volkswagen’s question of “what should we do with Bugatti?” was glue a few massive engines together and throw turbos at the resulting monster until it explodes with fury and speed, climbing up buildings in downtown New York and swatting planes out of the sky. The Veyron redefined our impression of speed, but its successor, the Chiron, merely expanded on that established format.
It’s been 24 years, but VW did just sell 55 per cent of Bugatti to that fine purveyor of Croatian electric hypercars Mate Rimac. He’s surely sitting somewhere fretting about what to do next with his new company – might we suggest a cheeky look in the archives...?