What kind of junk heap do you expect people to drive for only $600,000?
I think part of the design brief of the Bugatti was that it was to be a versatile supercar. Properly luxurious inside, a great car for long grand tours, capable of transforming itself into a track beast. A daily driver, even. Perhaps not ideal for very congested city traffic though - they are very low and very wide. Perhaps the next iteration should have a city mode where warning flags are raised from all four corners?
When cars first came along, they were considered so dangerous that a man had to walk in front waving a flag.
I know we’re getting way off track here. I was saying that repair bill was for something totally different. That’s like comparing your $2500 repair bill to what it would cost if the only damage was a scuffed up panel.
He wasn’t going straight home. The Bugatti dealership is on West 51st St between 11th Ave and the West Side Highway. If he was headed home he would have gone half a block ahead to take the West Side Highway north to the George Washington Bridge or south to the Lincoln Tunnel. Most of the streets around there are one way so it’s clear that he went around the block and drove somewhere to a more crowded part of Manhattan compared to where the dealership is, and he wasn’t headed home yet–if he was, he would have turned left and not right on 10th Ave to take the Lincoln tunnel, or gone straight ahead on 42nd St to the West Side Highway.
I lived a few miles from that area for 6 years, and one of my best friends has lived on West 51st for 25 years. I live in the burbs now and have often driven in and parked in that area.
Wow, way to reinforce stereotypes. I know that most people who live in Arkansas aren’t hayseeds…but damn. You do know that millions of people manage to live and work in the city without having car collisions, getting mugged, or being eaten by rats, right?
That is literally the most beautiful automobile that I’ve ever seen.
I’m about an hour north of NYC and have been there many times, including driving there enough to have a feel for it. More often than not I’ll take the train to the city and get around with subways and cabs, but I’ve driven there a fair few times.
If I were forced to live in NYC there isn’t a chance in hell I’d have a car at all. To me, the whole point of living in such a populous location is the ubiquitous public transportation. (And low carbon footprint per capita, of which public transport is a non-trivial part.)
Driving in the city is a absolute nightmare, matched only by the horror of parking in the city.
EDIT: If I lived in NYC for years, it’s doubtful I’d even have a driver’s license.
It looks like a cock n’ balls wearing a tuxedo.
Truly. If I had $2-mil to drop on a car, that is something like what I’d look for.
When the California lottery topped $50-million us worker bees at lunch were sitting around and fantasizing about what we’d spend it on. One cow-orker looking at me siad, “And 'Dog would get himself a new car.” I was driving a perfectly serviceable but elderly VW Beetle at the time. Another who knew me better replied, “Naw. He’d get a really cool older car.”
I just smiled and said, “A Shelby Cobra. Not one of those Shelby Mustang wannabees, but a real Shelby Cobra.” All the men smiled and nodded while the women looked confused.
Way to reinforce gender stereotypes there, because OF COURSE no woman could ever know what a hot historic car is. FFS. :dubious:
Pretty sure that title belongs to the '37-'38 Talbot-Lago Coupe.
Or that all men do. I had to click on the link to see the car, because I didn’t know what a Shelby Cobra was.
Great user name/post combo there!
He was describing the women who were physically there, not all women. But hey, you do you; manufacture that outrage wherever you can.
Yes, and then everyone applauded.
You get used to it. I’ve lived here all my life, and actually drove a yellow cab some years (decades) back, for a couple of years.
That said, anyone who drives a Bugatti, Ferrari, Lamborghini, etc. in NYC is an idiot (although I get that Morgan may just have been driving it home). Driving a car with two inches of ground clearance and a $25,000 (which might be lowballing it) paint job on this city’s miserable streets? Yeah, that’s going to cost you.
While I spend most of my road time in Queens and Brooklyn, I’m no stranger to Manhattan driving. And in my decades of NYC driving, I’ve never been in a moving vehicle accident, despite our narrow two-way streets and horrid corner sight lines. This isn’t to say my vehicles haven’t been damaged, but always when parked (and I have to street park). Despite what our suburban and rural cousins think, NYC drivers are generally pretty good. We tend to know the dimensions of our vehicles much better. We know how to be aggressively careful, as passive driving often will get one stuck. We’re attentive, because we have to be. Bikes, pedestrians, other vehicles, and all sorts of other nonsense come at us from every direction.
To be fair, the only track a Bugatti belongs on is Ehra-Lessien. They’re heavy luxury vehicles with shit handling (for the price). In a catch-all track like Nurburgring, a Veyron runs slower than a Porsche Panamera - you know, the four door Porsche (may we never speak of it again).
I’m sorry, no. First of all, the statement “Tracy Morgan crashed his $2 million Bugatti” could reasonably be understood to mean that Tracy Morgan crashed his $2 million Bugatti. You know, reading words for what they mean, meaning in this case that Tracy Morgan did this thing to his brand new $2 million Bugatti. Only it turns out that he probably didn’t really do anything, and this woman just drove into him. My issue here is not about the legal assessment of fault, but about abuse of the English language.
Secondly, though there may be a weird dialect where you live, in my experience the word “crash” is used to describe a very serious accident, usually evoking images of a total wreck and personal injuries. Otherwise terms like “accident”, or in this case, “minor accident” or “fender-bender”, would be more appropriate.
So you have a title that implies that Tracy Morgan reduced his new Bugatti to a total smoldering wreck and nearly killed himself, while the reality is that some woman dented his fender. Language, man – language – it’s how humans communicate!
Right.
Since no one else has addressed this point:
…you are more or less correct. The original company, founded in 1909, was quite successful through the 1930s, but never recovered after the war and stopped making cars in 1952.
In 1987, the name was acquired by an Italian businessman who produced a supercar known as the EB110 between 1991 and 1995. The company went bankrupt after producing 139 units.
Then in 1998, Volkswagen bought the rights to the name to start manufacturing the new Veyron supercar and its brethren. The Veyron was designed to be the fastest production car in the world. It had a 1000 HP W-16 engine and a top speed of over 250 mph. Despite being originally priced at 1 million euros, each one was reportedly sold at a loss. (I don’t know if that’s still true, or if the enormous R&D costs have since been recouped.)
I remember walking by the showroom in downtown Berlin in the early 2000s and seeing an early prototype before the first roadworthy units had been produced. I hadn’t heard anything about the project before and was completely knocked out by its unique appearance.
That said, although it represented an absolute pinnacle of engineering excellence, its only function now, especially for someone who isn’t a skilled racing driver, is as a sign of conspicuous consumption. It’s useless as a daily driver in the real world for reasons others have mentioned here, and even if you wanted to drive it on the track, there are plenty of cars that can outperform it on a road course for a tiny fraction of the price. I doubt that there’s anywhere east of the Mississippi that you could legally take it up to 250+. It takes several miles of nearly straight road to get up to that speed, and once you get there you can only maintain it for a few seconds before you run out of fuel.
I’ve driven sports cars on racetracks and ordinary cars in New York City. If I were rich enough to buy a Veyron, I wouldn’t, because there are scores of other cars that are more fun to drive and cost much less. If I were rich and crazy enough to buy one, I would never dream of driving it home from a showroom in Manhattan, for the same reason I wouldn’t buy a Ming vase downtown and carry it home on the subway. I would have had the vase delivered to my house, and the car delivered to the motor sports country club where I drive and garage all my track cars.
IMHO, Morgan was an idiot to buy the car and a bigger idiot to even consider driving it in the city.