Here’s Why Bugatti Shoved a V16 Engine Into the New Tourbillon Hypercar

“When I came in, I think that a lot of people were scared that the [next Bugatti] would be electric or that it would be digitalized. It’s quite the opposite,” Bugatti CEO Mate Rimac said with a smile.

Unveiled in Molsheim, France at the company’s historic headquarters last month, the new Bugatti Tourbillon takes the torch from the Chiron with an 1,800-horsepower plug-in hybrid system built around an 8.3-liter V16. While it looks like the logical next step for the brand, the new Bugatti could have been a totally different car without sixteen cylinders to its name.

“We were thinking about whether to make a luxury car. Any type of option was on the table,” Rimac said. Bugatti could have veered toward luxury-car territory without straying far from its heritage. Today it’s primarily known for building speed record-breaking cars with four-digit horsepower figures, but its resume of historic models includes a 252-inch-long, 12.8-liter straight-eight-powered limousine named Type 41 that made a Rolls-Royce look like a Model T when it broke cover in 1926.

Executives ultimately decided to extend the brand’s hypercar lineage by developing a successor to the Chiron. “Bugatti is about pushing boundaries so it has to have a hypercar,” Rimac reasoned.

The next point his team needed to address was the powertrain. Here again, the company had several choices: electric, hybrid, and non-electrified. Rimac’s expertise lies in batteries and motors, not complicated valvetrains and pistons, so many fearfully assumed that whatever came after the Chiron would be electric. The Volkswagen Group, which resurrected Bugatti over 20 years ago before Rimac assumed control in a joint venture formed in 2021, threw gasoline on the bonfire by pushing for a battery-powered model.

“We had two easy options. We had the Nevera, which is a 2,000-horsepower EV with all-wheel-drive that goes 400 kilometers per hour. On paper, it sounds like a Bugatti. On the other side, we have the Chiron with a combustion engine. We could have started from those two cars. The obvious thing was to start from the Nevera and make an electric Bugatti by putting a different skin on it,” he said.

That would have been the easiest and cheapest way to open a new chapter in the history of Bugatti. The puzzle pieces were all there: the drivetrain, the platform, and the electronic architecture have already been developed, tested, and homologated. Rimac could have saved millions by giving the Nevera vaguely Bugatti-esque styling and calling it a good job well done, but he chose the hard way.

Several factors influenced this decision, according to Rimac. “We don’t think that making a Bugatti is about doing the easy or the obvious. It’s about doing the right thing,” he summed up. He added that keeping a combustion engine in the equation was important because “we wanted to have emotions.”

The car was beginning to take shape: a hypercar marketed as a follow-up to the Chiron with a rear-mid-mounted gasoline-burning engine that took all-you-can-eat turns at the horsepower counter.

Rimac wanted the engine to be naturally aspirated. He argued that it’s more “emotional” than a turbocharged engine, and the plug-in hybrid system’s motors would compensate for the relative lack of low-end torque. The company had reached another fork in the road: it could design an engine from the ground up or squeeze another life cycle out of the W16 inaugurated by the Veyron in 2005.

“I said, ‘Mate, why not use a V12? You can have the same power with a V12,’” Emilio Scervo, Bugatti’s chief technical officer, told me. He’s got a point: Lamborghini’s Huracán successor will downsize from a V10 to a twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V8 rated at 739 horsepower. Reaching the 1,000-horsepower mark with four additional cylinders wouldn’t be that hard, even without forced induction.

Downsizing was ruled out. So, why not summon the W16 for one more dance?

“Mate rightfully was firm on the 16-cylinder layout and came back to the motto that if it’s comparable, it’s no longer a Bugatti. The idea was to make something that no one else has, like a 16-cylinder engine,” Scervo said. “There was a moment, and it was just before I joined [Bugatti from McLaren in 2021], when because of the challenges associated with the length of the V16 the company was thinking about using a naturally-aspirated version of the W16. When I came in, I challenged the idea that a longer engine meant a longer car. I said, ‘let’s work on the architecture of the car instead.'”

Besides, he preferred the V16 because it’s lighter than the W16 and it has a lower center of gravity. Making it fit without ending up with an incongruous, wiener dog-like wheelbase was challenging but not impossible. Every other part of the Tourbillon is also new, including the monocoque, and the project was still in the early stages of development when the decision to use a V16 was taken, meaning his team had time to tweak the chassis. Trying to shoehorn such a gigantic engine — its crankshaft is over three feet long! — into an existing platform would have been considerably more difficult.

Still, Scervo had triggered a war of millimeters. In addition to the V16, engineers also needed to carve out space for the hybrid system’s 25-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery. Packaging it all required finding clever solutions. For example, the seats are fixed but the pedal box is adjustable, and the monocoque doubles as the battery’s cover. The engine is tilted at 11 degrees toward the cabin, an angle that also helps accommodate a massive air diffuser which starts roughly at the wheelbase’s halfway point.

“Every week, an engineer would come to me and say, ‘Emilio, we need 50 millimeters more in the wheelbase.’ I’d say, ‘you’re not getting it!’ We never increased the wheelbase,” he said proudly.

His team pulled it off. The 8.3-liter V16 is approximately 9.4 inches longer than the 8.0-liter W16, which is not an insignificant difference, yet the Tourbillon’s wheelbase is roughly an inch longer than the Chiron’s. The new model is also lighter than its predecessor, though the final figure hasn’t been announced, and it’s more spacious inside. Rimac’s words ring true: there’s nothing comparable to it.

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