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Bugatti's Latest Veyron, Most Ridiculous Car on the Planet?
Wired has an amusing writeup that accurately captures the most recent ridiculous addition to Bugatti's automobile catalog. The $2.1 million Veyron sports over 1,000 horsepower, a 16-cylinder engine, and a top speed of 245 mph. The guilty conscience comes for free. "That same cash-filled briefcase could buy seven Ferrari 599s or every single 2009 model Mercedes. You could snap up a top-shelf Maybach and employ a chauffeur until well past the apocalypse. Hell, in this economy, $2.1 million is probably enough to make you a one-man special-interest group with some serious Washington clout."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_vehicle
The whole point of a halo car is to demonstrate engineering prowess and/or get PR for the company. It certainly worked; Bugatti went from being a maliase-y brand nobody had heard of, to a brand almost any 18 year old kid and any car enthusiast worth his salt knows about. It wouldn't surprise me if Bugatti make a big move into a (obviously lower) luxury market very soon, cashing in on the recognition they've earned.
Please help metamoderate.
Airplanes go pretty fast on asphalt actually. A typical commerical airliner takes off at about 200 mph and lands at 150-175. The Concorde took off at 250 mph. The shuttle is well over 200 at touchdown.
TODO: Something witty here...
They also demonstrated the silliest thing about it, or any 200+ MPH car... It takes quite a while to get to those speeds. You may get 0-60 in 3 seconds, but the acceleration drops off rather rapidly. About the only place you can get a car like that up to speed *is* a test track with an enormous straight.
I think it must have been 8 miles or more because they commented that the far end was out of sight due to the Earth's curvature!
A guy tried driving a super-Ferrari (an Enzo, I think) like that here in Southern California a few years back. yeah, You guessed it. Mr. Supercar? Meet Mr. Telephone Pole. Sadly, the dumbass driving it survived.
Another show mentioned how fragile they are. When they are featured on a show or test track, supercar makers box them up like ancient relics and ship them there. Contrast to the episode with the McClaren SLK that was simply driven to the filming site from two countries away.
They would not have used the launch control (a computer-controlled system that primes the engine and gearbox for the quickest start off the line) in the Veyron - if they had, there would have been no point to the film.
The Veyron does 0-100Km/h (approx. 0-61mph) in about 2.5 seconds. The McLaren F1 does the same in 3.2 seconds.
While the F1 is indeed an engineering marvel, and probably much more enjoyable to drive on a race track than the Veyron, it is clearly outclassed, though not surprisingly given the large age difference.
1000 horsepower is a lot of power.
You're full of shit. But hey, you sound like you know what you're talking about, so you must be right.
The Prius has about 90 pounds of NiMH batteries in it. Those batteries are largely benign, so you could toss them into the trash if you wanted to with the rest of your refuse if they failed, but Toyota will pay you to recycle them.
Now, I think the "toxic manufacturing process" largely comes from the nickel that goes into the battery back. Now, I'm not sure how much of each cell is nickel, but I do know that your standard steel is about 10% nickel. Given that most of your standard vehicle is steel (and I'm sure the Bugatti is made of a ton of exotic materials like carbon fiber whose manufacture is more toxic than steel and can't be recycled like steel), and that the Veyron weighs about 1,000 pounds more than the Prius - even if the Prius battery was 100% nickel the nickel content of both cars would be similar.
Plus when you factor in that the lead-acid battery in the Prius is about half the size of your typical lead-acid battery, you cut the possible leakage of lead into the environment (which is much worse than nickel) in half.
I suspect that most of your assumptions about the toxicity of the Prius (and all other NiMH batteries) come from the widely debunked CNW "Dust to Dust" marketing study which claimed that the Prius alone was responsible for the widespread destruction of the area around a mine in Canada and that a Hummer (and thus a Veyron, apparently) is more environmentally friendly than a Prius.
I'll simply point you to this link: http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/is-the-prius-battery-toxic where in the comments the claims are quite easily refuted (see especially comment #8).
I dare you to suck on the tailpipe of any internal combustion vehicle. Please have paramedics on standby before you do.
While cars are very clean these days and can in fact emit exhaust that is cleaner in some aspects than normal air, any claims of exhaust coming out cleaner than "city air" has to be taken with a grain of salt.
BTW, the fact that it is able to shut off half the engine at low speeds only points out the fact that the engine is grossly over sized and powered for those speeds. It would be far more efficient if it simply had half the cylinders to start with (but then it wouldn't be able to push to speeds of 245mph).
Hate to tell ya, but you've got a flat 6, not a V6, sitting behind you...
There are two sets of costs: non-recurring and recurring. The non-recurring costs include all of the engineering effort, R&D, putting together the production facility, etc. The recurring costs are those that you incur for each unit produced.
I find it highly unlikely that the recurring costs are more than $2.1M for the car, unless it was made of solid iridium or something. (Annual production of iridium is something like 3 tons.) I wouldn't find it surprising at all, though, if Bugatti had sunk quite a bit of R&D money into developing the tech in the Veyron, and perhaps a bit of dough on the production facility.
Wikicars says this:
So far, the oldest article I've seen claiming these numbers is this one from early 2007. By the end of 2006, fewer than 50 had been produced. If we assume this number applies to the first 50, then that means the total cost to that point was a cool £250million. Yow!
Since then, though, another 150 have been produced. I highly doubt that it cost another £750million. In fact, this article points to most of the costs having been R&D costs with this quote:
That's 250 man-years. If you assume each engineer costs $250K/year for labor, benefits and overhead, that's $62.5M in labor costs developing the transmission alone. Throw in all the machine work and parts and everything else, and I'm sure you easily get up to $100M development costs on the transmission alone.
People keep throwing that £5 million per car number out there, but I seriously believe it's way out of date.
Program Intellivision!
Bogus, debunked here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2186786/
No... If acceleration is what you're after, at a fraction of the price, what you want is a Caterham 7 Superlight R500.
http://www.caterham.co.uk/assets/html/showroom/superlightr500.html
0-60mph 2.88 seconds
Power-to-weight 520bhp-per-tonne
Top Speed 150mph.
Under GBP40k.
I built its little brother (7RS150), with 0-60mph of 5 seconds, in my garage a couple of years ago. It's a very very very fun toy...
You and the grandparent are under a misapprehension. Generally the rich do not pay "duty" or "tax". Many of the people who buy this will be oil baron types from countries with no fuel tax. The type of people who "can afford it" are the type of people who pay almost nothing. Hell even Warren Buffet (who pays 17% tax whilst his assistant pays 30%) and Bill Gates (Sr.) have been campaigning against the unfairness of how little they pay.
Once again with feeling. Tax is for little people. Like you.
P.S. Actually an interesting thing about Warren Buffet's comments is that if you look through the Google search it seems this hasn't been reported much in mainstream media????
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The McLaren F1 been discussed is not the race track version but rather the road legal super car built in the 90's in limited numbers.
This is why forklift trucks run on gas, and why cars which have been adapted to run on gas are so much cleaner. Since the optimum mixture is somewhat lean, there is always a certain amount of excess oxygen in the exhaust and no carbon monoxide. On gas, the emissions are predominantly carbon dioxide and water.
Because the optimum mixture for petrol is somewhat rich, you get quite a lot of carbon monoxide and a certain amount of soot.
nope.
isle of man, for instance, has no national speed limit.
fyi, they're part of GB.
It's not about fate, it's about character.
there be no shelter here, the frontline is everywhere!
Um, no. The Prius -- especially the 2010 which I bought -- accelerates well: you'll be swerving around a minivan or a Hummer full of kids before you swerve around me. And I have absolutely no problems keeping up with traffic on US interstates.
You're either terribly opinionated or you're reflecting on how some Prius drivers DRIVE their vehicles (as opposed to what the car is capable of). In fact, it is my experience that the SLOWEST cars, the ones that leave 20-car gaps in front of them in heavy traffic and go 30 MPH on merging ramps, are non-hybrid cars being driven by people who evidently are trying to get hybrid mileage out of them. (Or who got a manual transmission and hate it.)
Yep, you can drive a Prius 70-80 and still be getting 40 MPG.
Actually, rich people are the lousiest charitable givers.
That is false. Actually, as a percentage of income, the middle class is the worst. The poor give away between 4 and 5%, the rich between 3 and 4%. The middle class gives much less than either. Unfortunately, all classes are starkly divided along the lines of givers and nongivers. While the average poor person is much more likely to be a nongiver, the averages are "fixed" by the one-in-four poor person who gives with extraordinary generosity.
This will be unpopular here, but the fact is that the group that gives the most is religious conservatives (disclaimer: I am religious but not conservative). And before anyone tries to negate the giving of the religious because a lot of that money is tithes, etc., understand that religious conservative people are actually more likely to give to secular charities than secular people, despite the fact that secular households earn about 16% more on average than religious households.