Yahoo Autos Bugatti Tourbillon Preview: 1,000-hp V16, 800-hp electric motors, gorgeous interior
LONG BEACH, Calif. — A few months ago, Bugatti invited us out to a studio in Long Beach, California, to get an early look at a prototype version of its latest creation, the Tourbillon. As the follow-up to two of the most iconic luxury-performance vehicles of the past two decades, the Tourbillon has some sizable shoes to fill, as both the Veyron and the Chiron were standard bearers of hypercar engineering during their respective eras.
The high-performance landscape has also gone through some fairly dramatic changes in the time since. While the near-1,500 horsepower produced by the Chiron’s quad-turbocharged W16 was otherworldly in 2016, it seems notably less remarkable at a point in time when there are luxury sedans capable of producing more than 1,200 horsepower and the world’s quickest production vehicle offers nearly 2,000 hp.
The paradigm shift brought on by high-performance EVs has not gone unnoticed by Bugatti, though. In 2022, the automaker formed a technical alliance with Rimac, the Croatian EV upstart that produces the world-beating Nevera. In its early stages, the partnership tasked Rimac with the development of an all-new powerplant for what would eventually become the Tourbillon, but the agreement soon evolved to effectively give Rimac founder and CEO Mate Rimac full control of the Bugatti brand through a 55/45 split with Porsche, Bugatti’s prior parent company.
This, of course, begs a question: How do you follow up an automotive icon like the Chiron with something that feels equally unprecedented when your other company has upstaged that car with its own technology? As Bugatti design director Frank Heyl explained it, you focus less on the stats and more on the experience.
“Yes, obviously it will be extremely fast. But I don’t really like to talk about the numbers. It’s more about how you feel in the driver’s seat, the sensations – the haptics of the switchgear, the smell of the leather, and the sounds and vibrations of the engine. It’s an emotional experience that can’t really be expressed in numbers.”
That experience is driven in no small part by the Tourbillon’s jaw-dropping hybrid powertrain. At the front end of the Tourbillon, there’s a dual-motor and dual-inverter setup that’s good for 600 horsepower, along with a third electric motor in the rear that delivers an additional 200 hp of its own. Matched with a 25 kilowatt battery that’s submerged in oil to maintain ideal cell temperatures and molded into the underside of the Tourbillon’s carbon fiber monocoque, Bugatti’s latest hypercar dishes out a healthy 800 horsepower sheerly through electric propulsion. It also allows the Tourbillon to go all-electric for an estimated 37 miles.
Then there’s the engine, a 64-valve, naturally aspirated 8.3-liter V16. The V is not a typo we intended to be a W. The all-new mill with the more common cylinder formation than those of its W16 predecessors delivers another 1,000 horsepower of its own without the aid of forced induction, allowing it to rev out to a soaring 9,000-rpm redline and sound absolutely incredible while doing so. Total system output is 1,800 horsepower.
