The Bugatti Veyron was once the priciest production car in the world,
with a hefty price tag of $1.3 million. Powered by an 8L quad-turbocharged W16 unit,
the Veyron used to be the fastest car in the world and was supposed to make its producers,
Volkswagen, a ton of money. But 13 years from the date of its release, and it has incurred
massive losses for the company. In fact, Volkswagen lost over $6 million on each unit sold,
bringing the total loss to around $2.3 billion! How did the Veyron top the list of the world's
most expensive cars, while simultaneously being the biggest loss making car?
Why did Bugatti continue sell these cars at such an insane loss? Stick around to find
out and don't forget to hit subscribe and like the video for more videos like this!
The Bugatti Veyron is mid-engine sports car, designed and developed by the Volkswagen
Group and manufactured in Molsheim, France. The Bugatti Veyron was named after the racing legend
and Frenchman, Pierre Veyron. Over the years, several special variants have been produced
including the Grand Sport (Roadster), Grand Sport Vitesse and the SuperSport World Record Edition,
which was discontinued after a year. To make it even more unique,
Bugatti began offering prospective buyers the ability to customise
exterior and interior colours by using the Veyron 16.4 Configurator application on the
companies official website back in December 2010. It was discontinued in late 2014,
but special edition models continued to be produced until 2015. There have also been some
special editions by car tuners like Mansory, who produced one of the most expensive Veyrons ever,
the Bugatti Veyron Linea Viviere, which costs nearly $2.5 million.
However, the first ever Bugatti Veyron was revealed in 2005, churning out 1,001hp, which
was enough to also make it the world's fastest production car with top speed record of 253mph.
It was named Car of the Decade and best car award (2000-2009) by BBC television programme Top Gear.
The standard Bugatti Veyron also won Top Gear's Best Car Driven All Year award in 2005.
The Veyron Super Sport produced over 1,200hp with a top speed of 267mph, ballooning the price tag
to about $2 million. However, the base price didn't even come close to recouping the cost
of making just one of these Supercars. With Volkswagen losing $6.25 million on each car,
the Veyron became the biggest loss-making car in Europe over the last decade by a distance. So how
could a great car with a price tag around $1.5 million lose so much money? The analysts put the
blame on enormous Research & Development costs of around $1.62 billion, and very low sales volume.
What this basically means is that the engineering costs for a Bugatti Veyron are astronomical. Most
of the parts are handmade, crafted to perfection to produce the highest possible power and
performance, and this doesn't come cheap. Because this is an exclusive car, not many units were
produced. As a simple law of economics, the amount sold couldn't generate enough profits to cover the
production cost, and they couldn't sell the cars at a higher price than it was already going for.
To offset the substantial cost, Volkswagen created special edition Veyrons such as the Herm s-edition
and a "Legend" model which were sold at a price enough to recoup some of its losses
and debuted at the March 2016 Geneva Motor Show. When the 1,500hp Bugatti Chiron was unveiled,
Bugatti President said: "We did our homework in every dimension". "This car over its lifetime,
with 500 cars and a base price of $2.5 million,
is adding into the bottom-line result of Bugatti and we are making money with this project."
Even though Volkswagen never made any real profit from selling the Veyrons,
it shone a different light on the company and gave their brand some much needed fame and popularity,
allowing them sell their products at better prices, making them more profit in the long run
Nowdays, like most Bugatti's, the Veyron has shot up in price seeing a near 50%
increase since it was discontinued in 2015, but it still doesn't come close to it's successor,
the $3 Million Dollar Chiron, which according to Bugatti's previous President,
will run for 8 years. After that, Bugatti will be ready to build the next "best" car
in the world. What we don't yet know is, will the next record breaking Bugatti be electric?
It's a real possibility with EV Hypercar manufacturer Rimac recently taking ownership of
Bugatti without any money being exchanged, click here to find out more about that deal!