The modern machine of industry is obsessed with speed. Pumping out as many products per day as possible is the name of the game, unless you’re French, and work at a company called Bugatti.
In order to create near perfect paint finishes on its highly expensive hypercars, the automaker spends between 600–700 hours per vehicle getting the paint just right, and fulfill their exacting customers’ desires.
“The painting of a Bugatti hyper sports car not only requires incredible expertise but also the commitment and ambition to always meet the high quality standards of the brand, week after week, car after car” says Simon Vetterling, Bugatti Body and Painting Specialist.
Before the first layer of primer is even laid, Bugatti’s specialists check each panel for any imperfection. There’s no sense trying to achieve a perfect paint finish if your canvas is flawed, so specialists check for tiny pits and blemishes before even breaking out the paint gun.
Read: Bugatti Has A Metrologist To Ensure Its Hypercars Are Millimeter Perfect
Once the finish of the body panels is flawless, master craftspeople lay down an initial layer of primer, which is then sanded down to perfect smoothness, to prevent even imperceptible waves, bumps, or pits from forming.
That alone takes 100 hours, and it will take 100 more before the first layer of color can be painted. Before then, the painters apply a clear coat, oddly, and sand that down, and then clear coat and sand again, to bring a depth and richness to the final color.
Once the colors are applied, every panel is inspected and checked for variances. If a panel is even a shade darker than the others, it’s back to the atelier to be repainted. Bugatti says that ensuring that color stays consistent across different panels is a major challenge because they are sometimes painting over metal, and other times painting over carbon fiber, so its craftspeople take their time perfecting each panel.
Even then, though, the process isn’t done. Once the paint is up to the automaker’s standards, it goes through four days of polishing to ensure that the polish is absolutely perfect. It is then examined in the Bugatti’s light tunnel for ten hours to check for the smallest blemishes, all in the pursuit of creating a paint finish worthy of an artist.
Ettore Bugatti “grew up in a family of artists, [and his] canvas was the automobile, even before people considered them works of art,” said Christophe Piochon, Bugatti president. “We retain that ethos to this day at Bugatti, ensuring that every aspect of design and production is completed with dedication to aesthetic excellence.”
