The Duelist

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It took the best part of a decade to develop the Bugatti Veyron. When Ferdinand Piech turned his imperial eye on the culturally rich but financially poor French supercar maker he had a dream. He would instigate the creation of a hypercar that would categorically put everything else in the shade. It would be his legacy, Volkswagen's technical statement and quite possibly the zenith of what could be done with the internal combustion engine. Now very much in the autumn of its life. 

In the beginning three main technical foundations were laid. 

It would have 1000PS. 

It would be capable of 400kph. 

It would meet all of the same quality standards that a Volkswagen Polo has to achieve.

Whilst the first two are difficult, when coupled to the third you, as an engineer, are faced with an almost impossible task. Just think. You go and buy a brand new Polo from a dealer. It is guaranteed by Volkswagen not to go wrong for three years or 60,000 miles. That is three years of everyday drudgery. Hitting that same pothole a bit too hard everyday. Going a bit too fast on the motorway everyday, sitting in traffic for hours every week without over heating, shrugging off freezing temperatures at night and  starting first time in the morning. The modern motor car really is an everyday engineering miracle. Now imagine doing that with a Ferrari. Now double the power of said supercar and with it quadruple the complexity. When all was said and done and production model number 001 rolled off the line the project had cost Volkswagen so much that for every unit produced it is estimated that between 2 to 4 million Euros is lost. So you win the lottery /work very hard / inherit the family estate, walk into a Bugatti dealership and buy a Veyron. By doing that you've just cost Volkswagen in the region of 3 million Euros. 

Here's another thing. In the Alsace, where the Veyron is carefully constructed, it snows on average 1 day in a year. Now, the local authority, council, whatever prefers salt for its icy roads and duly peppers (salts) its roads during the cold season. In the best spirit of car making Bugatti like to take every Veyron produced for a gentle (really?) drive a round the local roads. When the roads are salted they could just do the same, bring the car back in, put it on a ramp and pressure wash the underside, getting rid of any unsightly salt that could cause future corrosion. No one would ever know. Instead 14 gentlemen from the Alsace load the car and themselves onto a transporter and support vehicles and travel to the south of France where they do the bedding in there. 

In many ways this is an amazing, glorious testimony to the sheer determination of Ferdinand Piech. After all, almost all of the great achievements in the relatively short history of humankind have been driven by single-minded men. On the other hand, and this is where I find a point of conflict, a dualism within myself, it is criminally wasteful. For every Veyron produced how many schools could have been built in Nigeria? How many courses of medicines could have been put into the hands of those 1 in 5 that suffer from AIDS in Africa? What about farming subsidies in Columbia or disaster relief in central Asia? Don't even get me started on political determination within the African Union. 

The Veyron is a wide eyed achievement. It is something that inspires, awes and upsets me all in equal measure. It is the same as the tanks that rumbled through Stroud train station the other day. As a fully grown adult I actually ran back into the station to watch those magnificent machines being marched past atop their own cars. I wanted to pilot them, to fire them, to use them in anger, but I also had to quell a desire to throw stones at them, call them names, sabotage them in some way.

This then is where A Slice Of The Now Splits. The current affairs blog will continue every Wednesday (or there abouts) but it will now be joined by a second blog that will celebrate all things machine.

I wish you and yours a happy new year. 

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