It does not happen every day that we have an unknown Bugatti in front of us, let alone three in one go. However, chief designer Achim Anscheidt no longer has to be secretive about a number of concept cars never seen before, so we now get to see them.
Honor who deserves honor. We have the American medium Autoblog.com to thank you for breaking the confidentiality of these concept cars. Anscheidt was kind enough to show the physical cars and / or share the design sketches with them. “I’m pretty happy that things like this don’t disappear into a cellar somewhere forever and nobody sees them,” he admitted. We can only agree with that. That is why we can now take a look at the Bugatti’s W16 Coupe, Atlantic and Veyron Barchetta.
Bugatti W16
Bugatti W16
You might recognize the La Voiture Noire Concept from a year ago in this car. The W16 Coupe indeed looks a lot like that. Yet this is a substantially different concept car. It may be a bit of a search, but the W16 (no more than a never-changed code name) has a clearly longer nose than the aforementioned concept. That has to do with the fact that the W16 engine of the Chiron in this model is in the nose. According to Anscheidt, the W16 never got any further than the drawing board and had cost a possible production model ‘between 15 and 20 million’. So it should have been above the Chiron in the range. That would have been very exclusive.
Bugatti Atlantic
Bugatti Atlantic
The Atlantic was a little more realistic. According to Anscheidt, this was almost introduced to the general public and went into production, were it not for the diesel scandal of the parent company Volkswagen (diesel) to throw a spanner in the works. Just as with the W16, the power source in the Atlantic should have been at the forefront, in this case a V8 from the Volkswagen Group. The Atlantic, with its clear Chiron style elements, should have become a more ‘affordable’ model under the Chiron. A more GT-like model for the ultra-rich customer. A true appearance, thanks to the Volkswagen XL1-like hinged doors. An open version was also drawn (see photo 6). After the peak of the diesel scandal, however, Bugatti saw no salvation in a delayed introduction of the Atlantic.
Bugatti Veyron Barchetta
Finally we see a third model that did not see the light of day before; the Veyron Barchetta. That of course has almost nothing in common except the name with the Fiat Barchetta. This is the oldest model of the three and probably should have been introduced to the world more than ten years ago. Based on the Veyron, a two-seater roadster was introduced, with style elements that later returned to the Divo. In addition to the subcutaneous similarities to the Veyron Grand Sport, this limited availability Bugatti had been a completely new story for the brand. However, this one never came, because Bugatti’s senior management did not trust the market for these types of cars sufficiently.