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.

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 ( ... )

→ Read the full story in the new ramp #69 "More Than Machines".