Bugatti Chiron 2018

What’s really important about the Chiron is it shows what happens when the best engineers from the whole VW Group bust a gut to probe the very limits of what a car can do against the implacable physics of combustion, aerodynamics, traction, cooling, and weight. One day that knowledge will be in your car.
First some fun facts. Acceleration isn’t only brutal at low speeds, it stays brutal to 300km/h and beyond. These are the numbers: 0–100km/h in 2.4sec, 0–200 km/h in 6.1sec, which is barely credible. Then 0-300 in 13.1sec, and 0-400 in 32.6sec.
It’ll corner at 1.5g, which means one-and-a-half your weight is pressing you sideways out of your seat. It’ll brake at 2g thanks in part to an airbrake. The engine ingests and exhausts air at the rate of 1000 litres every second at full power, or 4.6 tonnes an hour.
The rear tyres are 355/25 R21. When the car is at max speed, the wheel rims experience 3000 g of centrifugal force. The valve caps weigh 2.5 grammes at rest but with that force acting on them at full speed they’re effectively 7.5 kilos. Special valves had to be designed because the stems of ordinary ones were ripped outward, leaking air. Imagine the stress trying to peel the rubber off the tyre carcass. It’s why the top speed is electronically limited. The Chiron has the power to go faster even than 420, but who knows if the tyres could cope.
The Chiron’s weighs two tonnes, so you’d think the designers didn’t care about lightness. In fact they cared deeply, and there are some really exotic materials here. A full-carbonfibre tub and skin. Carbonfibre for engine pieces where no car had them before. Even carbonfibre anti-roll bars. Titanium bolts all over the place. Titanium for the silencer too. Formula One heat shielding. Carbon-silicon-carbide brake discs. Actual diamond slices as the membranes of the hi-fi’s tweeters.

If they hadn’t taken that detail-obsessive attitude, the weight would have ballooned, because of the mass of all the cooling for the eight-litre quad-turbo 16-cylinder engine. For the 1105kW of power it sends to the wheels it needs to reject another 2200kW (yes, two megawatts) of heat through its cooling system, which means 10 radiators.