Bugatti – More Than a Machine

“Look,” Michael, ramp’s editor-in-chief, explained to me on our way to Wolfsburg, “a Bugatti isn’t a car in the conventional sense. It’s a moving work of art – the avant-garde of kinetic art, where movement is an essential part of the piece.” Even when standing still, he said, a Bugatti draws attention to it and remains just as coveted. Driving, he insisted, isn’t the point. In the spirit of Ettore Bugatti, the brand’s founder, each car is a designed artifact. What Bugatti sought was nothing less than poetic engineering – a technological Gesamtkunstwerk with a metaphysical charge.

The roadworks in Wolfsburg were brutal. We circled through the city several times and kept missing the right turn. We were on our way to meet Franco Utzeri, head of the Zeithaus museum at Autostadt – and, in his spare time, a professor of Bugatti studies. He was already waiting for us while Michael continued to elaborate on the philosophy behind the brand.

Anyone who reduces a Bugatti to its performance, I learned, misses the point entirely. Most cars on this planet are built according to rational criteria: speed, comfort, safety, sustainability, design. There are means and methods to achieve such goals. Most vehicles result from a cost-benefit calculation – maximum outcome, minimum investment. A Bugatti, by contrast, is more than just a car. It is a cultural phenomenon that satisfies our curiosity for the superfluous and the irrational. Because nothing about it is rational: neither price nor weight, neither fuel consumption nor practicality. And precisely that is what makes it so desirable.

The notion that people always act rationally is false. There are many forms of desire. Mimetic desire, for instance – we want what others already have. A baby learns to walk and talk because it sees others doing it, and it wants to do it too, only better. Yet within us also lives a diffuse yearning for authenticity – a drive to formulate our own original desires in order to understand ourselves a little better.

People oscillate between dream and reality, inclined to recognize the dreamlike within the real. They long for the irrational. Perhaps the ability to act irrationally is precisely what separates us from machines. To give free rein to one’s moods and emotions – that is the true luxury embodied by a Bugatti. In fact, it’s more than luxury. It is luxury in its purest sense: radical freedom from purpose. A Bugatti doesn’t have to do anything – it just has to exist.

After several phone calls we finally found the right entrance to the Zeithaus. I was eager to see the Bugattis.

On our ramp assignments we’ve driven all sorts of cars: large and small, legendary ones that appeared in Hollywood movies back when I was still playing with a plastic Lada at preschool, brand-new models just off the production line, cars that could rocket like missiles, even vegan cars that run only on hydrogen. But never a Bugatti. To be honest, I had never even seen one. In Berlin, a Bugatti isn’t exactly a common sight.

So where do these artworks graze? I know now: in Germany, mostly in Wolfsburg, in the Zeithaus – the country’s most visited automobile museum. Nowhere else is the history of mobility presented so impressively. On my travels I’ve been to many car museums, including the smallest private one near my summer house in northern Brandenburg. People in the countryside get bored in winter and have plenty of space, so they open little museums on their farms. I like visiting such places. Once, in a sack museum (yes, really!), I marveled at an exhibit titled Old and New Sacks Through the Ages. My neighbor runs a brick museum in a disused factory, with more exhibits than annual visitors. And near Lake Gudelack there used to be an automobile museum that consisted of just one exhibit: the last government limousine of Erich Honecker, the penultimate head of the East German state council. He should actually have been chauffeured about in Soviet armored cars – what we in the USSR used to call “body bags”. Our general secretaries were old and barely mobile, and their cars looked like hearses. But Honecker had an irrational love for Citroëns. Over the years he ordered about a dozen of them, each longer than the last. He had the final one stretched to six meters. 

After his downfall he wandered aimlessly with his driver, unsure where to go. He wanted to hide at the economics minister’s bungalow in Brandenburg – but the angry populace was already there, having “liberated” the house and now eyeing the fallen tyrant’s car. Had Honecker owned a Bugatti – or at least a Ferrari – he might have stood a chance of escape. But his Citroën wasn’t built for speed, and besides, the people were everywhere. Like in the fable of the hare and the hedgehog, the hare stood no chance – wherever he ran, the clever people were already there. His young driver, a local from Brandenburg, knew a pastor near Lake Gudelack and took his boss to the church, where he could hide for a short time. As a token of gratitude, Honecker supposedly gave the pastor his car. So the legend goes.

The Citroën stood in the churchyard for years; anyone could come look at it, and if the owner was in a good mood, you could even sit inside. Eventually it was sold to a collector. That was the smallest car museum I’ve ever visited. The Zeithaus, by contrast, is huge – and because its halls are full of mirrors, you get the feeling of being surrounded by vintage cars wherever you look. In Wolfsburg, I thought, there are more cars than people.

A city built around a factory – an industrial city in a post-industrial age – Wolfsburg lives and breathes Volkswagen. When the company thrives, the city shines: tourists flood the pedestrian zones, shops and ice cream parlors fill up, young musicians play in the streets, hotel bars buzz with predominantly male guests animatedly gesturing over their drinks. From a distance, they look like football fans, but in truth they’re new-car buyers waiting to pick up their vehicles at the factory and tour the world of automobiles. 

But when Volkswagen catches a cold, the whole city coughs. Streets empty, construction sites go silent, the vacant shops lose their charm. Open are: opticians, hearing-aid stores, pharmacies, savings banks. On the day we visited, there were barely any people on the streets. Only pigeons sat on the empty café chairs, watching us as if to say: “What are you doing here? Need new glasses? A hearing aid?” The pigeons knew nothing about cars. And we? We just wanted to see a Bugatti.

Only in front of the Zeithaus was there life: a school class from Holland (surely skipping school for good reason), endlessly vaping young men, and families with toddlers, all standing in a semicircle around two Bugattis parked (for Michael and me) in front of the museum. Which awards these cars hadn’t won is hard to say – world’s most expensive, fastest street-legal cars, victors of Monaco and Le Mans alike.

They were stars, adored by everyone. Every kid and every grandma wanted

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→ You can read the entire Supersupersupertest soon in ramp #69 - “More than Machines.”