Bugatti CEO Mate Rimac has revealed he had to fight tooth and nail against an electric future for the brand.
When he took over the company in November 2021, Rimac said he was in heated discussions with the heads of Volkswagen and Porsche about whether or not to make the next Bugatti fully electric.
And he stood his ground because the next Bugatti will have a brand-new combustion engine.
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“I was fighting furiously with the management of Porsche and Volkswagen, really heated arguments, that the next Bugatti shouldn’t be electric. And I think that was absolutely the right decision,” he told Top Gear.
He said making the next Bugatti electric would have been easy, but he didn’t think it was the right decision.
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“That would have been the easiest thing for me, to take the Nevara, which we have developed for five years and just rebadge it into a Bugatti,” he said.
While Rimac had a fully electric hypercar, the CEO Mate Rimac said it wasn’t the right time for an electric Bugatti.
He also teased the next combustion engine, saying it would be developed from scratch and “you’ll be very surprised”.
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The company unveiled its roadster at Pebble Beach in California last month, declaring it a swan song to the W16 engine.
“For the final roadgoing appearance of Bugatti’s legendary W16 engine, we knew we had to create a roadster,” Rimac said.
Priced at $5 million, just 99 examples of the W16 will be made.
Rimac described the union of the roadster format with a W16 powertrain as “absolute perfection”.
“With the roof removed, and a pair of large air intakes directly behind your head feeding around 70,000 liters of air through the engine every minute at full bore, driving the W16 Mistral connects you to the intricate workings of this revolutionary powertrain like no other Bugatti to date,” he said.
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