Bugatti Veyron 16.4. – #795079 | radicalmag future classics

Not a good signal

There is something about the Bugatti Veyron. When the brainchild of Ferdinand Piëch finally came onto the market in 2005, Bugatti had quite a few difficulties selling the Veyron, which costs at least 1.3 million euros. It took until 2013 before the 300 units finally found a buyer. Anyone who did buy one actually got an excellent deal, because the VW subsidiary made a loss of around 1.7 billion euros on its first product, which is more than 5 million euros per vehicle.

And the Veyron did not really take off in the following years either. Sure, there are some unique pieces that were highly valued, even for more than 3 million, but the classic series vehicles more or less languish at the level of their sales price. Of course, this is not so good for investors – and somehow also surprising: in our opinion, the Veyron are already more special, more extraordinary than the Chiron. They deserve more love, also from the factory, which, however, does little or nothing to ‘care’ for its oldest son; the French could learn a few things from Pagani in this regard.

And now a virtually brand-new Veyron – 770 kilometres – is coming up for auction at Bonhams, with an estimated price of £500,000 to £800,000. Well, we have seen this quite often at Bonhams in the past few months: this game with the very low estimates. The traditional auction house is in a deep (car) crisis and is trying to attract new potential buyers with this very transparent trick. And yet: this half a million is a very bitter signal to the outside world, and it is likely to scare the Veyron owners, who are certainly among the most loyal Bugatti customers.