Groundbreaking as it was, it took the Volkswagen Group a long time to usher the Bugatti Veyron from concept to production. Over half a decade, in fact. And though it mattered little in the long run, the anticipating public had started wondering at that point if it would ever actually come to fruition.
But what if Volkswagen had started earlier? Like, a lot earlier? It might have at least started out looking something like this.
Dug up from the archives at RC Workchop is a speculative rendering of what the Veyron might have looked like if it had been made way back in 1945. And we have to say, it looks pretty convincing. A bit like a Beetle on steroids (or whatever they had in post-war Germany) – more than the Porsche 911 ever was, at any rate.
The lines are all Veyron, but the details – from the chrome trim and round headlights to the solid wheels and rounded window frames – are more typical of 1940s automotive design and what was capable at the time.
Of course, 70 years ago, the technology wouldn’t have been quite there, so it wouldn’t have produced the thousand horsepower or cracked the 250 miles per hour that it would in 2005. Bugatti was on the rocks at that stage too, never fully recuperating after WW2 until the marque’s resuscitation decades later. And Volkswagen – forget about it.
The German automaker, to put it mildly, was not the global industrial powerhouse in 1945 that it is today. Its factory in Wolfsburg was bombed out from the war, and the company (like the rest of the country) was governed by the Allied Forces. Suffice it to say that it wouldn’t have had the resources to undertake so unprecedentedly ambitious a project at the time.
Nobody would have, really. But it sure is interesting to think of what European industry might have accomplished had it not been ravaged by the Second World War and its resources devoted to armaments instead of automobiles.
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