IdeaStar Creative Director Brent Williams recently spent a week with his wife Chanda shopping on Chicago’s renowned Michigan Avenue. He spent a lot of time looking, but unfortunately not buying, this Bugatti Veyron.

What’s so special about the car, other than its great looks? Brent, IdeaStar’s resident automobile expert, explained the Bugatti Veyron costs $1.2 million, there are only 70 of them, and it makes 1001 horsepower with its quad-turbo, W16 engine. It is currently the fastest production car in the world with a top speed of 253.2 mph. It costs roughly $5 million to build each car, so they are losing about $3.8 million on each one they sell. So basically it was just a wild marketing ploy by Volkswagon (they own Bugatti) to hype the brand so they can sell much less expensive rip-off versions made with VW parts restyled to look like the Veyron.

Here’s a write-up from Wikipedia:

“The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 is currently the fastest, most powerful, and most expensive street-legal full production car in the world, with a proven top speed of 407.5 km/h (253 mph), though several faster or more expensive vehicles have been produced on a limited basis. It reached full production in September 2005. The car is built by Volkswagen AG subsidiary Bugatti Automobiles SAS in its Molsheim (Alsace, France) factory and is sold under the legendary Italian/French Bugatti marque. It is named after French racing driver Pierre Veyron, who won the 24 hours of Le Mans in 1939 while racing for the original Bugatti firm.”

Sorry Brent. Maybe next year IdeaStar will buy a Bugatti Veyron as a company car for you…. Maybe.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17, 2007 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.