It’s the end of an era at Bugatti as design director Achim Anscheidt steps down today but before he goes he’s dropped some more information on the car that will take over for the Chiron. Not only is the car “finished”, as he puts it, but we’ll get to see it next year. We also know a few more details about exactly what to expect.
Speaking to Autocar, Anscheidt dropped the bomb that the car is already finished to kick things off. In fact, he says that “we delivered the prototype tooling a couple of months ago and the production tooling will be delivered in a couple of months from now.” The work that went into this new model offered an all-new challenge though.
“What the Chiron manifests today and where the brand sits from the Veyron to the Chiron and where the brand is now established, it takes a certain level-headed design direction to take that next step and not be drawn into some kind of styling exercise,” he says. That makes sense as Bugatti is famously retiring the W16 quad-turbocharged engine and moving to an all-new power plant.
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Instead, this successor will leverage a hybridized V8 that sits inside of a new and expectedly lighter chassis when compared to the current Bugatti Mistral. Beyond that, little is known about the drivetrain other than the fact that the gearbox will sit in between the seats. We learned that from Frank Heyl, the man taking over the reins for Anscheidt.
He also spoke with Autocar and said that “If you compare [the Mistral] to the LaFerrari, it’s actually quite a compact car for what it is, with the gearbox in between the seats, which was done for weight-balance reasons… But with a hybrid powertrain, you have the added weight of the batteries, so you have to reconsider the architecture of the whole car.”
Despite whatever challenges the team faced, Heyl says that it’ll be “amazing” and “blow people out of the water” when it comes to “unexpectedness.” The same report says that the interior won’t be a super-flashy futuristic one full of screens either.
Much like current and former Bugatti models, it’ll mostly stay away from technology that could ‘date’ the car in the future. At the same time, this Chiron successor will get some sort of central infotainment screen. Perhaps it’ll be one that can hide itself when not in use. We’ll get a chance to see the whole car in all of its glory sometime next year before it reaches buyers in 2026.
