Bugatti Just KILLED the W16 Forever After 20 Years... Koenigsegg Wasn't Ready

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Time passes.

[00:00:02]True vision remains.

[00:00:04]20 years after [music] the Veyron defined the impossible, Bugatti honors the man who dared first.

[00:00:12]Over 1,000 horsepower and 400 kilometers per hour.

[00:00:17]Elegance [music] without compromise.

[00:00:21]>> Bugatti just murdered the greatest engine ever built. 20 years, four turbochargers, nearly 300 miles per hour. Gone. Not because a rival beat them, not because regulations killed it, but because Bugatti has to walk away on their own terms. And while they were quietly planning that exit, Koenigsegg was deep in a garage in Sweden building a car with one single purpose.

[00:00:45]>> Oh, it's extremely fast. It's 450 km/h fast. So, it's the world's fastest production car.

[00:00:52]>> And why is it so important to have a vehicle [music] that's that fast?

[00:00:54]>> Destroy the W16 forever. 330 miles per hour projected. Years of obsession. The most advanced transmission ever put in a road car. All of it aimed at one target.

[00:01:07]And then that target simply ceased to exist. So, today let us discuss what really happened, who it hurt most, and what comes next.

[00:01:16]The engine that shouldn't exist.

[00:01:18]To understand why this moment carries so much weight, you have [music] to go back to where it all started. Back to the late 1990s when Volkswagen Group acquired the Bugatti name and handed a group of engineers an instruction that bordered on absurdity. Build the fastest, most powerful production car ever made. Not a concept car, not a track-only special, a car that could be registered for public roads, a car that a person could drive to a restaurant, park, [music] and drive home. A car that would make every other manufacturer in the world feel like they were running a hobby operation. The engineers studied the problem from every angle and landed on a solution that sounded more like science fiction than automotive engineering. Take two W8 engines, a compact narrow angle eight cylinder design Volkswagen had developed, and fuse them together at the crankshaft.

[00:02:12]The result would be 16 cylinders arranged in a W configuration so dense and so wide that it would challenge the packaging limits of any car ever designed. They bolted four turbochargers onto this arrangement, two on each bank, added intercoolers, oil coolers, air conditioning cooling loops, and differential cooling systems that would require 10 separate radiators to keep the whole assembly alive at full load.

[00:02:39]10 radiators in a car. The complexity alone was enough to make most engineers walk away from the project entirely.

[00:02:47]Those who stayed produced one of the most significant mechanical objects of the 21st century. The W16 engine, in its first production form for the Veyron, displaced 8 L and produced 1,001 horsepower. 1,001.

[00:03:03]The number was not a coincidence. It was chosen deliberately to push past the psychologically significant 1,000 mark to make clear from the very first number that this was a different category of machine.

[00:03:17]2005, when the Veyron was delivered to its first customers, the nearest competitor in raw horsepower was the Ferrari Enzo at 660 horsepower. Bugatti had built an engine that produced over 50% more power than the car everyone else considered the benchmark.

[00:03:35]>> Um, while it's true that the 8 L quad turbo W16 [music] engine gains 50% more power, this is way more than a tune-up job.

[00:03:45]>> Not a modest improvement.

[00:03:47]An annihilation. The W16 required tires that did not exist when the car was designed. Michelin had to develop a completely new tire compound specifically for the Veyron, engineered to survive the lateral and longitudinal forces the W16 generate at full throttle without delaminating or overheating. The tires cost around $450 each to replace in the early years, and each set was only rated for around 1,500 miles before replacement was recommended. Owning a Veyron was not cheap. Neither was building one. Bugatti reportedly lost over 5 million euros on every single Veyron sold. They built 450 of them. The mathematics of that decision tell you everything [music] about what the Veyron was actually for.

[00:04:36]It was never about profit.

[00:04:38]It was about proving something. It was about drawing a line in the sand and saying, "This is what the absolute limit of automotive engineering looks like.

[00:04:47]This is where physics stops telling us what is possible and starts watching to see what humans will do anyway."

[00:04:54]The W16 was that answer. And for 20 years, it was the most convincing answer anyone had ever given. What made the engine truly remarkable was not just the headline figures. It was the refinement.

[00:05:07]At idle, the W16 was almost imperceptible. A low, cultured murmur that gave no indication of the violence waiting behind the throttle. At motorway speeds, the cabin was quieter than many luxury saloons. The engineering team had spent extraordinary amounts of time on noise, vibration, and harshness suppression. Making an engine with the character of a nuclear power station behave with the composure of a Swiss watch. That paradox, absolute savage capability wrapped in absolute gentlemanly restraint, became Bugatti's identity. And the W16 was not just the expression of that identity. It was the identity itself.

[00:05:48]The reign of the W16.

[00:05:51]From the moment the Veyron hit public roads in 2005, it occupied a position in automotive culture that no car had held before and none has fully claimed since.

[00:06:01]It was not merely a fast car, it was the fastest production car. It was not really an expensive car. It was the most technologically complex production car ever built. It sat at the intersection of every superlative the automotive world had to offer and it stayed there.

[00:06:18]Not for a model year or two, but for two decades. Every time a rival appeared to threaten the throne, Bugatti went to the W16, asked it for more and the engine gave more.

[00:06:29]In 2010, Bugatti released the Veyron Super Sport.

[00:06:34]The engineers reworked the turbocharger specifications, improved the intercooler efficiency, revised the engine management software and extracted 1,200 horsepower from the same fundamental architecture. The Super Sport ran at Volkswagen's Ehra-Lessien proving ground in Germany.

[00:06:53]>> The aim is to do each 26 km lap with the gas pedal to the floor, climbing up to 300 m and then zooming back down again.

[00:07:01]The Nürburgring was opened in 1927 >> and recorded a two-way average speed of 267.8 mph. Guinness World Records verified the run. The Veyron Super Sport became officially and undeniably the fastest production car in the world.

[00:07:19]Not the fastest car, not the fastest track car, the fastest car you could legally own and drive on public roads.

[00:07:26]The record was real, verified [music] and it belonged to the W16. Cultural moment that created cannot be overstated. 267.8 mph is a number so far outside normal human experience that it requires a moment to process. The average commercial aircraft during takeoff rolls at around 160 to 180 mph. The Veyron Super Sport on a public road was traveling 60% faster than a passenger jet at the point of liftoff. The W16 had taken automotive performance into territory that previously existed only in the language of aerospace engineering. Then came the Chiron in 2017.

[00:08:11]Bugatti did not simply update the Veyron.

[00:08:14]They built an entirely new car around the W16, taking the architecture that had served the Veyron and pushing it further in every dimension simultaneously. The engine grew to 1,500 horsepower.

[00:08:28]The aerodynamics were completely redesigned with active elements that adjusted the car's profile depending on speed and driver demand. The interior became a showcase of handcrafted luxury that Bugatti's crafts people in Molsheim spent months on per vehicle.

[00:08:44]The Chiron was not just a successor to the Veyron. It was an argument that the W16 still had decades of relevance ahead of it.

[00:08:52]And then came the moment that defined an era. In 2019, Bugatti built a modified Chiron, the Chiron Super Sport 300+ and took it to Ehra-Lessien with British racing driver Andy Wallace behind the wheel. The engineering team had worked with Michelin to develop a tire capable of surviving speed that no production tire had ever been asked to survive. The aerodynamics were revised specifically to reduce drag at extreme velocity. And on a warm August afternoon, Andy Wallace crossed the timing beam at 290.3 mph. They announced it as just under 300. The exact figure was 290.3.

[00:09:36]The number was barely comprehensible, nearly 300 miles per hour in a car with a number plate, with air conditioning, with a stereo. The W16 had taken a production car to a speed that even 5 years earlier most engineers would have called theoretical. And Bugatti had done it not with a concept, not with a single stripped shell, but with a car closely related to something you could configure on their website and have delivered to your driveway. For 15 years through two generations of car and three major evolutions of output, the W16 had never once been caught short. Every time the competition moved the target, the W16 had more in reserve. It was the greatest engine in the history of automotive production and everyone in the industry knew it, which is precisely why what happened next hit so hard.

[00:10:31]Koenigsegg's 20-year hunt. While Bugatti dominated the hypercar world with the overwhelming force of the W16 era, a much smaller company in southern Sweden was quietly building its entire identity around one objective, defeating Bugatti on the battlefield that mattered most. Not competing with the W16, surpassing it. From the moment Christian von Koenigsegg founded Koenigsegg in 1994, his ambition was startlingly direct. He did not want to build an impressive sports car or a respected boutique brand.

[00:11:05]He wanted to build the fastest production car in the world and he intended to do it from a small factory outside Ängelholm with resources that looked microscopic compared to the giants of the automotive industry. In the early years, Koenigsegg's creations already demonstrated extraordinary engineering ambition. Cars like the CC8S, CCX and CCGT earned admiration throughout the automotive press for their performance and technical sophistication, but globally, Koenigsegg still existed in Bugatti's shadow. The Veyron had become more than a car.

[00:11:41]It was an industrial statement backed by the financial [music] and engineering power of the Volkswagen Group. Koenigsegg, meanwhile, was viewed as the romantic underdog from Scandinavia, a brilliant outsider chasing an impossible target. But Christian von Koenigsegg never accepted that hierarchy. Instead of trying to imitate Bugatti's formula, he pursued a completely different philosophy. Where the Veyron relied on enormous power and relentless stability, Koenigsegg focused on lightweight construction, aerodynamic efficiency, and mechanical innovation.

[00:12:16]That philosophy reached a turning point in 2011 with the arrival of the Agera.

[00:12:22]Powered by a twin-turbocharged 5-liter V8 producing over 1,000 horsepower, >> most downsized production engine. It's a 5-liter twin-turbo dry [music] sump V8 with 1,341 horsepower, which is exactly 1 MW of power.

[00:12:38]>> The Agera weighed dramatically less than the Veyron and delivered a completely different driving character. It was not simply fast, it was agile, sharp, and technically daring in ways the heavier Bugatti never attempted. The Agera RS transformed that philosophy into a historic achievement. In November 2017, on a closed highway in Nevada, the Agera RS completed a verified two-way average top speed run of 277.9 mph, officially surpassing the Veyron Super Sport and claiming the production car speed record. It was one of the most remarkable moments in modern automotive history.

[00:13:18]A small Swedish manufacturer had defeated the most powerful automotive empire on Earth at its own game, but Koenigsegg did not slow down after taking the record. They accelerated even harder. In 2019, the Jesko arrived and immediately established itself as one of the most technically advanced hypercar ever created. It's twin-turbocharged V8 produced up to 1,600 horsepower on E85 fuel while revving to an astonishing 8,500 RPM, an extraordinary achievement for a turbocharged engine. Then came the light speed transmission, a revolutionary nine-speed multi-clutch gearbox capable of near instantaneous gear changes through a system unlike anything else in production cars.

[00:14:04]>> [music] >> Koenigsegg's engineering became so advanced that many of its solutions required new patents simply because nothing comparable existed. And then came the Jesko Absolute, the purest expression of Koenigsegg's mission.

[00:14:18]Every aspect of the car was optimized for maximum top speed. The aerodynamics were reshaped to achieve an astonishingly low drag coefficient while maintaining stability at extreme velocity.

[00:14:31]Koenigsegg simulations projected a theoretical top speed approaching a number that would have shattered every existing benchmark in the hypercar world. But then everything changed. In June 2024, Bugatti refused to continue the W16 speed war altogether. Instead of building a faster Chiron, they unveiled the Tourbillon, a naturally aspirated V16 hybrid that fundamentally redefined what a hypercar was supposed to be.

[00:15:02]Overnight, the battle shifted away from pure top speed numbers toward something larger. Emotion, philosophy, engineering identity, and the future direction of performance itself. And suddenly, the entire game Koenigsegg had spent decades preparing to win looked completely different.

[00:15:21]The day Bugatti changed everything.

[00:15:24]When Bugatti unveiled the Tourbillon on June 20th, 2024, the automotive world went quiet for a moment that felt longer than it was. Not the staged silence of a luxury reveal event.

[00:15:37]>> [music] >> The silence of people trying to process something that did not fit inside their existing understanding of what a Bugatti was supposed to be. Because the car on that stage was not a more powerful Chiron.

[00:15:50]It was not another evolution of the W16 formula. It was the opposite of everything the W16 represented. And it arrived without warning. At the center of the Tourbillon sits a naturally aspirated 8.3 L V16.

[00:16:04]Designed entirely in-house by Bugatti engineers from a blank sheet of paper.

[00:16:09]That detail alone was historic. For the first time in the modern Bugatti era, the company was not adapting Volkswagen Group architecture. This was Bugatti building its own mechanical identity from nothing. The new V16 revs to 9,000 revolutions per minute and produces 986 horsepower without a single turbocharger, supercharger, or any form of forced induction. Nearly 1,000 horsepower from atmospheric pressure alone. The Tourbillon's V16 produces more than Ferrari's celebrated V12 in the Daytona SP3 without forced [music] induction. That is not an improvement.

[00:16:49]That is a statement. But the numbers are only half the story.

[00:16:53]Journalists who heard the engine run >> [music] >> described it as unlike anything in the modern automotive world. At low revolutions per minute, it is restrained, almost polite. As it climbs past 5,000 toward 9,000, it becomes something else entirely. Sharp, clear, mechanical, almost violent. Not the muffled surge of a turbocharged engine building boost.

[00:17:16]A scream that sounds precision engineered rather than accidentally discovered. Inside Bugatti, the acoustic profile was a design specification from day one.

[00:17:27]The sound was not a byproduct of the engineering. It was a deliverable, as intentional as the horsepower figure itself. Then there is the hybrid system.

[00:17:36]Developed alongside Rimac Automobili, the Tourbillon adds three electric motors to the drivetrain.

[00:17:43]One at the front axle, two integrated at the rear. Combined with the V16, total system output reaches 1,800 horsepower. And unlike turbocharged power that builds as revs climb, electric torque arrives the instant the accelerator moves. No lag, no build-up.

[00:18:01]Just immediate, overwhelming force that arrives before your nervous system has finished registering the input. The combination of a naturally aspirated engine, screaming toward 9,000 revolutions per minute, with electric motors filling every gap beneath it, produces a driving experience that nothing else on the planet currently replicates. The Rimac [music] connection deserves a moment of its own. Mate Rimac founded Rimac Automobili in 2009 at 21 years old in Zagreb, Croatia. He converted a BMW 3 Series into an electric car in his garage. Not because it was a business plan, but because he wanted something fast and could not afford petrol performance. That garage project became a company.

[00:18:47]By 2021, that company had merged with Bugatti [music] to form Bugatti Rimac, with Rimac >> I have some pretty crazy ideas, and I wanted to do some of them in Bugatti.

[00:18:59]And then I realized, hmm, maybe better for Rimac maybe to test them first and then to do it in Bugatti maybe at some later point.

[00:19:05]>> holding the majority stake. The kid from the Zagreb garage now co-owns the most famous hypercar brand in history and his electric motor technology sits at the core of the Tourbillon's hybrid system.

[00:19:18]Every time that V16 fires and those three motors surge alongside it, part of that story belongs to a 21-year-old who refused to accept what was possible. The rest of the Tourbillon matches that ambition entirely. Titanium and carbon fiber chassis, fully redesigned suspension and active aerodynamics, an interior featuring actual mechanical watch movements integrated into the dashboard developed with Swiss horologists and functioning as real timepieces rather than decorative replicas. The price is 3.8 million euros before taxes. The waiting list filled almost immediately after the reveal because what Bugatti announced that June afternoon was not a new model. It was a new era and the entire hypercar world knew it the moment the covers came off.

[00:20:08]What happens to Koenigsegg now?

[00:20:11]The uncomfortable truth at the center of the modern hypercar war is that Koenigsegg spent years engineering the Jesko Absolut to defeat a very specific enemy, the W16-powered Bugatti. Every aerodynamic surface, every kilogram removed from the chassis, every simulation targeting 330 miles per hour, and every innovation behind the light speed transmission existed for one purpose, to win the top speed battle that had defined the hypercar world for nearly two decades. But in June of 2024, something unexpected happened. Bugatti removed the target entirely. The company did not lose the war. It retired the W16 on its own terms and replaced it with something fundamentally different, the Tourbillon. That shift changed the entire conversation overnight. Suddenly, the battle was no longer centered purely on who could produce the highest number on a timing screen.

[00:21:09]The Jesko Absolute remains an astonishing engineering achievement. Its transmission is one of the most radical gearbox systems ever placed in a production car, capable of near-instantaneous gear selection unlike anything else in the industry. Its aerodynamic philosophy is a masterpiece of low-drag engineering balanced carefully against high-speed stability.

[00:21:33]And if Koenigsegg eventually completes a verified record run near its simulated top speed figures, it will absolutely deserve its place in automotive history.

[00:21:43]But the hypercar industry has never operated purely on statistics. Numbers matter, but cultural momentum matters even more. The manufacturers that truly dominate are the ones capable of redefining what buyers believe a hypercar should actually be. And this is where the Tourbillon changed the landscape beneath the entire industry.

[00:22:05]Buyers are no longer only asking, "Which car is fastest in a straight line?" They are asking, "Which manufacturer has created the most complete vision of the future?"

[00:22:15]The machine that best combines emotion, engineering, technology, sound, philosophy into something that feels genuinely revolutionary. This is precisely why the pressure on Koenigsegg has never been greater.

[00:22:29]Christian von Koenigsegg built his reputation by refusing to follow established rules. Throughout the company's history, Koenigsegg repeatedly moved toward engineering ideas the rest of the industry considered impossible or unnecessary. The Regera proved this years before Bugatti unveiled the Tourbillon. Instead of chasing conventional transmission design, Koenigsegg removed the traditional gearbox entirely.

[00:22:56]>> This was completely revolutionary when we decided [music] to do it to remove actual shifting mechanisms from a gearbox, >> [music] >> compounding gears 3 * 3, >> and developed a hybrid system so powerful that existing transmissions could not survive its torque output.

[00:23:13]Long before electrification became fashionable in hypercars, Koenigsegg was already using electric motors not for efficiency, but for performance beyond what combustion alone could deliver.

[00:23:26]Now, the company faces an entirely new challenge. The next Koenigsegg cannot simply be a faster Jesko. That is no longer enough. The entire hypercar industry is shifting simultaneously towards sophisticated hybrid architectures, instant electric torque delivery, and emotional naturally aspirated combustion engines operating together as unified systems. Bugatti planted its flag with a naturally aspirated V16 hybrid. Rimac demonstrated the terrifying acceleration potential of pure electric performance. Ferrari, McLaren, and Porsche are all moving deeper into electrified platforms. The era of the standalone combustion hypercar as the absolute pinnacle is beginning to close. And that is what makes this next chapter so fascinating, because the true rivalry between Bugatti and Koenigsegg was never only about speed. It was about two completely different philosophies competing to define the future of automotive engineering itself. One pursued overwhelming force, refinement, [music] and limitless luxury. The other pursued lightweight innovation, mechanical creativity, and radical problem-solving.

[00:24:37]That competition is still alive. In many ways, it is only now entering its most important era. So, there it is. The engine that took 20 years to build, 10 radiators to cool, and two generations of Bugatti to perfect, retired by its own creator before any rival could claim the kill. Koenigsegg built the Jesko Absolute to beat a car that no longer exists. Rimac, a kid who started in a garage, now shapes Bugatti's future. And the hypercar world wakes up every morning with rules it did not vote for.

[00:25:09]W16 era or Tourbillon era, which side are you on? Drop it in the comments right now. Subscribe if you are new because this rivalry is far from finished. We will see you in the next one.