It is widely understood that the featured one off car is for Ferdinand Piech, the former boss of VW group who also introduced his own luxury car brand at Geneva

It is widely understood that the featured one off car is for Ferdinand Piech, the former boss of VW group who also introduced his own luxury car brand at Geneva this year. The lifetime of these cars is pretty limited, the Veyron no longer is where it is at, it is an old car but not a classic old car, it just says 'eugh' to some people that have seen it before. A technical marvel when new, now quite passe. The Bugatti brand value is an interesting exercise in make believe. It is a revived brand, there is no common heritage. But they pretend there is and nobody points out the flaw to this thinking. At least VW's Lamborghini brand is a bit more credible, there is some thread between the old and the new. The Lamborghini style is spot on for consistent lineage, with Bugatti they have to have the horseshoe grill even though it makes no sense from an aero or other engineering relevant reason. In theory VW could bring out a 'Tucker' car and pretend that there was some link between the three headlamped effort their designer comes up with and the original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_48 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_48 They could sell the thing with faux American heritage and have it churned out of their Slovakia plant with a few Bentleys. If there was novelty in it people would buy it just because nobody else had one yet. Meanwhile MacLaren are making cars that are ageing gracefully. There is no fake heritage and there is no horseshoe grill or other legacy novelty that goes with resuscitating a badge engineered image. They are also in the business of doing extremely expensive one off projects but that seems okay as the tech filters down to the cars affordable by lesser multimillionaires. Returning to VW, the original brand proposition was 'the people's car', something that could bring motoring to the masses. Plenty of other marques had this starting point. But right now we need some reinvention of that with some humble electric car. I think something could be put together with enough range to get you to work and to the train station for longer treks, with a modest sized battery, super-capacitor and humble seats for less cost than a cheap hatchback. But we haven't had that, we keep getting these absurdly expensive cars that are not for the masses.