bugatti veyron
Photo courtesy Bugatti Automobiles S.A.S.
The Bugatti Veyron. See more exotic car pictures.
How would you define the most amazing production car in the world? Would it be:

  • The car with the most horsepower?
  • The car with the fastest top speed and acceleration?
  • The most expensive car?
At the moment, the Bugatti Veyron appears to have it all:
  • A W-16 engine that can produce 1,001 horsepower
  • A top speed of 250+ mph (400+ kph)
  • A zero-to-60 time of three seconds
  • A zero-to-180 time of 14 seconds
  • A price tag somewhere in the $1.2 million range.

In this article, we will take an in-depth look at this amazing automobile and see how it is possible to fit so much performance into a single machine. It all starts with the engine...

The Bugatti Veyron is a car built around an engine. Essentially, Bugatti made the decision to blow the doors off the supercar world by creating a 1,000-horsepower engine. Everything else follows from that resolution.

bugatti veyron
Photo courtesy Bugatti Automobiles S.A.S.
The Bugatti Veyron features a 1,001-hp engine.

So let's start with the engine. How would you begin the design process for an engine this powerful? If you have read How Car Engines Work, you know that if you want to create a 1,000-horsepower engine, it has to be able to burn enough gasoline to generate 1,000 horsepower. That works out to about 1.33 gallons (5 liters) of gasoline per minute.

How much gas is that?
Here's a quick calculation, which you can ignore if you hate math:
  • 1,000 horsepower is equivalent to roughly 2.6 billion joules per hour. A gallon (3.8 liters) of gasoline contains 132 million joules, so a 1,000-hp engine has to be able to burn just over 20 gallons of gasoline per hour.
  • However, car engines are only about one-quarter efficient -- three quarters of the gasoline's energy escapes as heat rather than as power to the wheels. So the engine actually has to be able to burn at least 80 gallons per hour, or 1.33 gallons (5 liters) per minute.
  • Let's convert over to metric. Gasoline requires about 14.7 kilograms of air to burn 1 kilogram of gas. Air weighs 1.222 kilograms per cubic meter at sea level. A gallon of gasoline weighs 2.84 kilograms. So the engine has to be able to process 2.84*1.33*14.7 kilograms of air per minute, or roughly 45 cubic meters of air per minute. That's 45,000 liters of air per minute.
  • If a V-8 engine is turning at 6,000 rpm, it can inhale a total of 24,000 cylinders' full of air per minute. If it needs to inhale 45,000 liters of air per minute, it works out to roughly 2 liters per cylinder-full. That's a 16-liter engine.

We need a 16-liter engine to burn 1.33 gallons of gas per minute. That actually makes sense -- the engine in the Dodge Viper is 8.0 liters in displacement and produces 500 hp.

But there's a problem: A 16-liter V-8 engine would be very large. And the pistons would be massive, so there would be no way it could turn at 6,000 rotations per minute (rpm). It might turn at a maximum of 2,000 rpm, meaning that you would need an immense 48-liter engine to generate 1,000 hp. Clearly an engine that big is impossible in a passenger car.

bugatti veyron
Photo courtesy Bugatti Automobiles S.A.S.

So how did Bugatti fit 1,000 horsepower into a passenger car? Let's find out.