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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."
Working in Singapore a year ago I noticed that there were a lot of Lamborghinis around. Its a bit silly because their highest speed limit is 80km/h and the island isn't big enough to get the thing to top speed anyway.
Apparently the thing to do is wake up at 4 AM, cross the causeway into Malaysia and point the car at Kuala Lumpur. Two hours later you are having breakfast in KL. The drive back would be after the traffic cops have woken up for the day so you take a bit longer for that leg, and carry some cash
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Yeah, like they gonna sell millions of these. Keep your commie green cool aid to yourself, eh, monkey boy?!
"Commie" is a bit inappropriate, considering the immense environmental damage caused by communist regimes. It kinda figures, considering that they were all about "progress", technology and industrial "victory". The Nazis, OTOH, were relatively "green", at least in theory. Hitler was even a vegetarian (sort of). Cue Godwin!
brand nobody had heard of
Are you kidding? Bugatti has been around forever.
Nowadays Bugatti is owned by Volkswagen and the Veyron is it's "gimmick" (for the car illiterate, this is an understatement) to show the world how bloody good they are. The "Volk" (people) part of VW is prohibitive in marketing luxury cars. The Phaeton for example just doesn't get the attention it deserves in the limousine segment.
IMHO the pedigree isn't there anymore. Bugatti was very successful in the old days but ever since Ettore Bugatti passed away in 1947 the company just didn't have a sense of direction. In 1987 the name Bugatti -and not the expertise and craftsmanship- was bought by an entrepreneur which produced the horrible Bugatti EB110. Now VW produces the Veyron and it's currently the technically most sophisticated car around but the blood line is definitively cut.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
does it run linux?
I don't know about the Veyron, but the Tesla Roadster does. I have one of the logs right here. 2.6.11.8-1.3.0, BusyBox 1.00, 32 megs ram, Philips-LPC2294 CPU, etc.
All them years of priest training, taken out by one bounty hunter.
I have an unrestricted S4, and removing the limiter is the only mod it has ever had.
Now it is 4 years old, I finally had the time and safe place to test the top speed (well, "top" as in "got clamped by the rev limited instead"), and I got to a GPS measured 268 km/h before the rev limiter kicked in. It was somewhere in Germany, I happened upon this 5km stretch of perfect viewable road by chance (and had to drive another 5km before I found a chance to return and USE it :-).
Overtaking a row of 8 (I think) police vans at 220 km/h on cruise control during the run up was just a bonus (you know you're legal but still the nervousness remains).
There is, however, a good argument why you won't do this for long even if it's entirely legal and you find a safe bit of road to test. With a fuel consumption of just under 60 (yes, SIXTY) liters per 100km you will need a MUCH bigger tank to get from A to B. It's ridiculously uneconomical to push such a large amount of steel over 4 wheels against the wind.
Having said that, it's also good fun annoying BMW drivers who don't seem to know that "S4" means "brutally large factory sports tuned V8 in front, gripping on 4 wheels on sport suspension". Fnarr fnarr..
Conversions (all approx):
268 km/h = 166.5 mph
60l/100km = 1.67km/l, 4.7 MPG(UK) or 3.9 MPG(US)
Final notes for wannabees: I have had extensive high speed training. Don't try this stuff unless you're (a) stone sober and in top physical condition, (b) are 100% sure of the condition and capabilities of your car (and even then), (c) on location where such speeds are legal and (d) can do so without causing any risk to other road users (on circuit is even better) - and that's after doing some test runs.
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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.
You do understand that your average commute only uses 15-35hp, right? The reason hybrid and gas-electric vehicles are so much more efficient is because their generator only needs to be sized and optimized for average power consumption, rather than peak.
At that speed, you don't have to ... if they can't read the license plate, or even see if there IS a license plate, they can't do a whole heck of a lot. 300 to 400 mph is FAST. A friend of mine actually managed to make a stock car street legal, and he told me that, at the speeds he would do once a year (he only did about 1,500 miles per year with it, since it needed a complete engine rebuild after a few "runs"), "you know the striped lane dividers - at that speed, it's a solid white line." He blew by a radar trap, drove for a few more minutes, and parked in a restaurant. 10 minutes later, the cops came in, arguing as to whether the car in the parking lot was his. After they told him that they couldn't make a positive identification, they asked him to open the hood, just so they could take a look-see. They were impressed.