Volkswagen revived Bugatti in Alsace and then handed it to a Croatian electric-car founder
Ettore Bugatti started building racing and luxury cars at Molsheim in Alsace in 1909. Nearly a century later, Volkswagen bought the name, built a new factory beside his old guest house and chased speed with extraordinary engines. Then, calling the brand unprofitable ballast, it passed control to Mate Rimac, the young Croatian founder of an electric supercar company.
Volkswagen created Bugatti Automobiles as a French subsidiary on 22 December 1998, the same day it acquired the design and naming rights from Italian businessman Romano Artioli, whose company had built supercars such as the EB 110 in Italy since 1987. VW bought Château Saint-Jean, an 1856 manor that had been Ettore's guest house, to serve as headquarters. The original factory belonged to the engine maker Snecma, which refused to sell, so VW built a modern atelier just south of the château, inaugurated on 3 September 2005.
The comeback started with concept cars. Giorgetto Giugiaro of Italdesign drew a coupé shown in Paris in 1998, a four-door saloon in Geneva and a design called the 18/3 Chiron in 1999, before VW's own EB 18/4 appeared in Tokyo. All carried a 555-horsepower 18-cylinder engine arranged as three banks of six, the first W-configuration engine ever fitted to a passenger car. Later, the 16C Galibier saloon concept of 2010 proposed a 1,020-horsepower version of the 16-cylinder engine with superchargers, at a projected price of around 1.4 million dollars.
Sales stayed tiny. About 700 cars were sold between 2005 and 2020, and in 2020 Bugatti delivered just 77, though it also reported its third straight year of rising operating profit, its best in history. Even so, VW's chief executive Herbert Diess wanted out, and talks with Rimac began in September 2020.
The result, from November 2021, was Bugatti Rimac, a joint venture 55 percent owned by Rimac Group and 45 percent by Porsche, which in turn holds 24 percent of Rimac Group. Mate Rimac became chief executive on 1 November 2021, and a month later Bugatti launched Sur Mesure, French for tailored, to handle one-off commissions.
Source: Bugatti Automobiles
