Geneva 2016: Bugatti Chiron doesn’t move the game on, just plays it better
When the Bugatti Veyron arrived in 2005, there really was nothing else like it. In one step, it redefined almost all automotive benchmarks, be they price, speed or just about any other conventional metric on which a car is judged. So as big shoes to fill go, the new Chiron certainly has had a hard time simply incrementally upping all those crazy stats once more.
But for us, Bugatti’s elephant in the room is that the Veyron’s form was very much prescribed by its engineering and arbitrary benchmarks set by the VW Group board. It may have jumped the automotive stats forward, drawing comparisons with Concorde’s transformative impact on the aviation industry in the process, but as a piece of design, the Veyron has always been something of a disappointment.
That’s maybe too strong a word for the design of the new Chiron – there’s no way it wouldn’t turn your head if it burbled by on the street – but as it incrementally moves the Veyron story forward, rather than reinventing it, the design progress we’d hoped for isn’t quite there.
Yes, there are some huge, unbroken sweeping surfaces that are satisfying to run your eyes over; the new C-shaped sweep around the doors links past and present very well, and the new lamps add a welcome hint of the high technology hiding within.
But for us, if the Chiron really is to be compared with the likes of Concorde, it should push things further forward. Emblasoned on Bugatti’s stand are words to the effect of ’where others stop is where we start’. It’s a shame that Bugatti seems to have stopped quite so close to the mark the Veyron left 11 years ago.