Category: personal

In this online review, Joe Brown of Wired waxes eloquent about the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport, a new ultra-high-end sports convertible.  The Grand Sport costs a cool 2.1 M$ and boosts appropriately over-the-top stats like a top speed of 217 mph and 1001 horsepower from a 16-cylinder engine.  It will come as no suprise to anyone who knows me, but I find this car — all cars, really — singularly unmoving.  I’ve never been an American in love with the road.

Joe Brown is, or at least, he’s in lust with it.  His prose is rapturous while describing this overpriced, inefficient, and essentially unneeded major appliance:  He revels in the “isolationist joy, an out-of-body awareness that you’re moving faster than the world can react” and delights in watching “entire generations of insects die on your prow”.  A major draw seems to be that the car can outrun “not only the 5-0’s cruisers, but their helicopters, too”.  And it’d better, because driving that fast is liable to make your car an overpriced kinetic-kill weapon — the world’s largest and silliest bullet.

But that’s OK, because no real person driving real roads would ever be able to get the car up to that speed, much less maintain it for anything but an infinitesimal time.  I’m always astounded by how crucial top speed seems to be to the ego of a car enthusiast, who must drool (at a distance) at the flights of fancy embodied in the speedometer.  Though the car will never, in any practical usage, reach this speed, the auto junkie needs to know that, by God, it could, if only no one else ever drove on the roads.  Of course, a car like this is by design the opposite of practical.  The admittedly impressive engineering involved (getting a convertible that can function at 200 mph is, I concede, quite a feat) is intended only to impress, not to achieve the elegant solution of a practical problem.  In that sense, it’s the exact opposite of engineering.  Indeed, this comes off as almost a streamlined Rube Goldberg machine:  What is the silliest way to move an individual between point A and point B?  The Grand Sport.  It’s not art in engineering; it’s just peacock feathers.

Towards the end of the review, Mr. Brown admits “It is not perfect — no car will ever be.”  He laments that “We’re at the end of the petroleum era, the end of a golden age of supercars where speed can be sought regardless of consequence.”  Let’s certainly hope so.  Let’s hope we soon wake up from this delusional teenage fantasy of consequence-free open road indulgence.