Key Takeaways
- Bugatti Tourbillon’s dihedral doors were not designed for attention but grace.
- Shift paddles feel immensely mechanical and cold to the touch; start button transforms into a pull switch after being depressed.
- Every element is meant to be timeless.
The Bugatti Tourbillon is a masterpiece in more ways than one, both in terms of engineering and design, and replaces the Chiron’s quad-turbocharged W16 with a new naturally aspirated V16 that’s paired with electric motors to produce 1,775 horsepower total. This latest Bugatti is very different from its predecessor, and there are some interesting explanations for why some of those changes emerged. Speaking with CarBuzz at The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering during Monterey Car Week , Frank Heyl, Director of Design at Bugatti explained how one of the Tourbillon’s most distinctive details was done out of “necessity,” not for the sake of styling.
There were many amazing elements on both the Chiron and its predecessor, the Veyron, but both of those cars lacked the upward-opening “billionaire doors” that can be found on rivals from Lamborghini, Pagani, Koenigsegg, and others. The Tourbillion has dihedral doors that open up and forward along with a piece of the roof, which looks dramatic whenever you turn up at a destination. Heyl gave the following explanation for why the Tourbillon doesn’t have traditional doors:
“You want to be able to take your missus to the opera house in the ball dress and get out on the red carpet without looking funny. So we opened part of the section of the roof together with the door so you could get out gracefully.”
– Frank Heyl, Bugatti Director of Design
A Necessity Of Design
Heyl stopped short of calling the dihedral doors an accident, affirming that everything Bugatti puts into a car is fully intentional. That being said, the doors were designed as a consequence of another decision, namely making the Tourbillon lower than the outgoing Chiron.
“We made the car 33 millimeters (1.3 inches) lower while maintaining the same cabin ergonomics. You’re sitting at the same backrest inclination, you have the same legroom, same headroom, and same shoulder room. How did we do that? We deleted the rails underneath the seat and put them right on the floor. It will still move up and down and the backrest will still incline, but now the pedals and steering wheel come at you.”
– Frank Heyl, Bugatti Director of Design
If Bugatti used traditional doors on the Tourbillion, you would have to crawl under the roof to get in. Heyl says “it’s uncomfortable” and it “wouldn’t be Bugatti-like.” Now, a woman can get in and out of a Tourbillion without having a Basic Instinct moment.
Necessity For Everything
Bugatti’s intentionality stretches far beyond the doors and into nearly every element of the Tourbillon. The watch-inspired gauge cluster is a work of art and the steering wheel around it was designed to ensure the driver would never be detached from seeing the gauges. “It comes out of a necessity to create cars that are relevant in 100 years’ time,” Heyl said when asked about the steering wheel and other analog elements of the Tourbillon’s interior. “If you go analog, you want everything close up so you can read it. You don’t want any spokes obstructing your vision of your instrumentation.”
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9 Reasons Why The Bugatti Tourbillon Is Another Veyron Moment
The Bugatti Tourbillon is another massive step forward for internal combustion, and the automotive industry as a whole.
“These things have been around for centuries, and yet they still get driven,” Heyl said of vintage Bugatti vehicles. “Timelessness is key. These things need to be timeless and authentic. That’s why we decided to do the entire human-machine interfacing between how you operate the vehicle and how the vehicle displays information at you in an entirely analog fashion, because we believe that this makes it timeless. Hopefully, it will still be relevant at a Concours d’Elegance 100 years later.”
Theater Is Everywhere, Even The Engine Start Button
When spending over $4 million on a vehicle, you’d expect painstaking attention to detail. In our conversation with Heyl, we learned that everything from the overall structure of the Tourbillon down to the buttons and switches in the interior are meticulously designed to perfection.”We spend weeks and months in meetings with dozens and dozens of people,” Heyl said of how long it takes to perfect a button in a Bugatti. This may sound like a joke, but Ettore Bugatti’s timeless words about avoiding comparisons with anything else ring true in 2024. What a car.
“The toggle switches, for example, need to have a certain pressure point to be just right. They are machined from solid aluminum so they are cold to the touch. If you pull the paddles on the steering wheel, it’s like pulling the trigger of a sniper. You start the [Tourbillon] by pushing a button; that button will then come out, you pull on it, and that starts that car. We wanted it to feel like a classic Bugatti.”
– Frank Heyl, Bugatti Director of Design
