- Bugatti’s Americas COO avoids driving the brand’s own cars in public.
- His daily driver comes from the same group, several rungs further down.
- Doering said the Tourbillon reached production without AI touching its design.
Bugatti builds 80 to 100 cars a year for the entire planet, and roughly 40 reach American buyers in a good year. That number shapes how Sascha Doering does his job. The COO of Bugatti Americas knows his clients’ kids’ birthdays, calls them for no particular reason, and asks them to dinner when their travel overlaps. What he doesn’t do is drive a Bugatti home or let AI anywhere near his work.
Having previously worked at an IKEA cafeteria, Doering slowly worked his way up the corporate ladder to his current role at Bugatti. He maintains close relationships with the company’s clientele and does spend plenty of time behind the wheel of Bugatti models, albeit only alongside customers at rallies and organized driving events
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According to Doering, those relationships often extend well beyond the sale. Dinners and phone calls aren’t a sales tactic so much as the job itself. “Personal relationships are of the utmost importance,” he said.
“I know where my place is,” he told Business Insider in a recent interview. “I don’t want to create a perception that the COO of Bugatti of the Americas is going for a joyride in a Bugatti.”
A Humble Daily Driver
So, what does Doering drive instead? Perhaps unsurprisingly, he parks another VW Group vehicle in his garage, namely an Audi A8 L. While it’s far removed from a Bugatti in terms of performance, it, too, has an obvious focus on quality and luxury. As a means of traveling to meetings and grabbing dinners with owners, something Doering says he frequently does, an executive sedan sounds perfect.
Losing even a single buyer stings at that kind of volume. “We cannot substitute clients. We cannot lose clients because they are so rare, as rare as our products are,” Doering said.
AI? No thanks.
Then there’s the matter of artificial intelligence. The world is in the middle of an AI boom, and companies that don’t embrace it are at risk of being left behind. Many of the world’s largest car manufacturers are using these tools to help with the development and design of future models. However, Bugatti remains committed to a more traditional approach.
During the same interview, Doering noted that the company didn’t use AI in the design, development, or production of the new Tourbillon hypercar. “They are not utilizing AI for design purposes,” he added. “Maybe that becomes a thought in the future, but at the moment, in the Tourbillon, I don’t think it has been.”
Doering himself isn’t big on AI either, noting he still puts together his own PowerPoints and only occasionally uses Claude for simple, routine tasks. He said preparing presentations himself forces him to work through the analysis and storytelling instead of outsourcing the process. “I’m still one of the guys who writes his own story and puts his own PowerPoint together,” he told the publication.
