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Alexander Vershinin about decadence

Alexander Vershinin

16.09.2011, 36 (268)

The other day, representatives of the Bugatti company, returned from oblivion in 2000 at the initiative of the Volkswagen corporation, made a truly brilliant statement. Explaining to journalists the reason for yet another disruption in the production schedule of the Bugatti Galibier super sedan ( the second car in the lineup of the revived luxury brand), the charismatic bosses of the company could not find anything better than to announce that the sedan prototype shown to them was not… outrageous enough.

Indeed, a car with a 16-cylinder engine and two mechanical superchargers, which produces only 800 horsepower and, among other wonderful details, is decorated with eight exhaust pipes, may seem to Bugatti executives not to live up to the high ideals of true decadence. You shouldn’t be surprised: the ideological predecessor of this car bore the proud name Bugatti Royale, reached 6.4 meters in length, and under its immense hood was hidden a 12.7-liter inline eight - a real engineering miracle for 1927, when the first of the six existing examples of Royale. The final and most extravagant touch in the history of Bugatti’s almost century-old automobile masterpiece was the fact that the company’s owners installed engines that had already been assembled, but were never used in production, as propulsion systems on motor carriages—self-propelled railway cars.

Today one can only admire the Khlestakov aplomb of the Bugatti management: in the context of the global battle for environmental friendliness, efficiency, safety and sterility of automobile traffic, such behavior is very rare. Today, on the contrary, the Toyota concern’s doctrine of turning a vehicle into a device from the household appliances department is especially close to successful implementation; some cars can already be connected to an electrical outlet, like a washing machine or toaster.

However, in the faceless ranks of mass-produced auto products, you can still find true decadents, cars whose excess, selfish and often completely inapplicable in the real world qualities still warm the hearts of their owners, the inveterate individualists. Who can imagine a situation in which the owner of the diesel masterpiece Audi Q7 V12 TDI would meaningfully use all 1,000 Newton meters of torque that turns a three-ton jeep into a highway diesel locomotive? The builders of the Bugatti Royale would certainly be proud of such a car.

They would probably approve of the devilish grinding of the sports exhaust of the latest Mercedes-Benz C-Class AMG Black Series coupe, the sound of which can be heard at a distance of a couple of kilometers, in violation of any permissible volume standards for a civilian vehicle. True decadents will appreciate the gigantic and completely redundant wing on the trunk of the all-wheel drive Subaru STI sedan, squeezing 400 horsepower from a four-cylinder engine and tailored according to the precepts of rally auto engineers from the distant 1980s. And who, if not them, will rejoice at the completely ordinary-looking Cadillac CTS-V family station wagon, capable of taking four children to school and then humiliating a BMW M3 on the track thanks to the 556-horsepower V-8 hidden under the hood . Finally, nothing but pure love for the art of automotive engineering could motivate Porsche engineers to create an extreme version of the Porsche 997 GT3 RS coupe, prone to killing its owner at the first opportunity, like the turbocharged 911s of the mid-1970s that were notorious for their exceptional bad temper.

The question of why such cars are needed at all is best answered by the very head of Bugatti, Wolfgang Dürheimer: the person behind the wheel should not have even a shadow of doubt that his car is one of a kind.

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