Bugatti’s newest sports car, and the successor to the world’s fastest car, will be unveiled in March next year, and there are already more than 100 orders placed for the car.
The Bugatti Chiron, the next-in-line supercar from Volkswagen AG’s Bugatti marque, will see its debut at the 86th Geneva Motor Show next year, the company said in a statement. The Chiron is named after Louis Chiron, a championship-winning driver who raced under the Bugatti name in the 1920s and 30s.
The Chiron follows after the Veyron, Bugatti’s last supercar that was first released in 2005. With the 2010 Bugatti Veyron Super Sport hitting an average top speed of 268mph at Volkswagen’s Ehra-Lessein test track, the car is certified in the Guinness World Records as the “fastest car in the world” (a title that has been under dispute by at least one rival).
In February, Bugatti announced that it had sold the last of its 450 Veyrons. The Chiron is rumored to have an engine that is 25% more powerful than the 1,200-horsepower one found in the Grand Sport Vitesse, according to Bloomberg.
Even with its reputation for making lean and mean driving machines, the France-based Bugatti isn’t considered a financial success for Volkswagen. With an average price of 2.3 million euros ($2.4 million) per Veyron, VW may have lost 4.6 million euros ($4.9 million) per vehicle on the Veyron, Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Max Warburton told Bloomberg.
In 1998, Volkswagen purchased the rights to the Bugatti marque after the company had gone bankrupt in 1995.