2011 Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport. It's probably your second or third Bugatti, after your normal, 987-hp, $1.6M 16.4 coupe and your $1.9M open-top Grand Sport.
And you've handed over another $28,000 to take your new car to one of Bugatti's customer track days at Volkswagen's Ehra-Lessien test track in Germany, which has a 5.6-mile-long straightaway that is one of the very few places on earth where you can legally prove the Super Sport's claim to be the world's fastest production car.
So after your car has been meticulously checked and you've done your sighting laps with Bugatti's test-driver Pierre-Henri Raphanel sitting shotgun, you fire it up. Then you insert your special top-speed key into the slot in the dash and muster every last bit of go-fast glory you can work up and put your foot all the way in and hold it there.... What happens?
Not So Fast
You run into an electronic speed limiter. Yep, same way you do in a Corolla. OK, it's a speed limiter that cuts in at 258 mph, but it's a speed limiter all the same. Seems as though the suits at the Volkswagen Group, which owns Bugatti, aren't prepared to shoulder the risk of you going any faster, even if you paid them more than $2 million for the privilege.
The standard, unrestricted coupe or Grand Sport will do 253 mph flat-out. So all that extra money and all that extra power has bought you an extra 5 mph. It's just enough to recapture the title of world's fastest production car from the SSC Ultimate Aero. Bugatti figured that was enough of a reason to justify building this third Veyron model. Well, that, and the company really, really needs to get rid of the final batch of Veyrons, the last of which are supposed to be built by 2012.
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