The 2022 Bugatti Chiron Super Sport Is a Car Worth Being Thankful For

Few will ever drive it, fewer yet will ever own one. Yet we should be glad, on some level, that this hypercar exists.

Published November 23, 2023

The last couple months of the calendar year, generally speaking, are a time for taking stock and giving thanks. Obviously, there’s Thanksgiving, a holiday whose name gives away the store in terms of its intentions. But Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa also have a place for appreciating what one has — family, community and yes, fun new gifts. And then, of course, there’s New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, both of which are a chance to reflect back on the previous year and set a new, better course for the upcoming one — one that improves you and better honors that which you care about.

The Bugatti Chiron Super Sport might seem to be an odd thing to give thanks for, at least for the 99.999993807 percent of Earth’s population that doesn’t have one. (Yes, I did the math.) After all, it’s one of the least relatable vehicles money can buy these days, with specs that sound more like science fiction — or fodder for revolution — than something you could buy in a showroom.

The Chiron Super Sport’s engine packs four more cylinders than any other new car, and twice as many turbochargers. At 1,578 horsepower, that W16 makes twice as many ponies as a Ferrari 812 Superfast; its 1,180 lb-ft of torque outtwists almost every heavy duty truck from Detroit. Its top speed of 273 miles per hour is more than one-third the speed of sound at sea level; it can outrun every production helicopter on the planet. And the median American household would need to dedicate 50 years of their entire income to afford the base price — 56 years for a copy optioned like the one I drove around Connecticut for an hour and a half.

But this superlative-laden hypercar represents, arguably, the ultimate endpoint of pure internal-combustion automotive development — the pinnacle of 125 years of development dating back to Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz. So with the era of electrification looming, the ICE age fading and the current generation of 16-cylinder Bugattis about to come to an end, I took arguably one of the finest automobiles that (a lot of) money can buy out for a quick spin earlier this fall … and, to be quite frank, I’m very glad I did. Here’s why.

The Chiron Super Sport is just so, so, so bloody quick

The modern world is blessedly rich in quick cars, and some of them can even keep pace with this pure-blooded hypercar, at least at the speeds most people drive. A Porsche 911 Turbo S will match the Chiron Super Sport from 0 to 60 miles per hour; a Tesla Model S Plaid will beat it to that mark.

But even the likes of Zuffenhausen’s mightiest Turbos and Elon’s punchiest Plaids can’t match the poke of this Bugatti in the end. Where mortal cars start to slow as they reach triple-digit speeds, the Super Sport seems to grow more powerful as it picks up velocity. At 100 miles per hour, the big Bug feels like it’s pulling harder than ever, a wave of unlimited power that could carry you straight on to heaven if you stay in it long enough.

If prose doesn’t win you over about it, try cold hard numbers, calculated by the test crew at Car and Driver: 0–100 mph takes 4.1 seconds; 0-130 takes 6.1; 0-150 takes 8.0. You can conquer the quarter mile in 9.1 seconds, and you’ll be going 161 mph by the 1,321st foot. In the time it takes Journey to get through the chorus of “Don’t Stop Believin’,” a stationary Chiron Super Sport will have accelerated to more than 200 miles per hour, should the driver desire it.

Keep in mind, also, that the Super Sport isn’t just any Chiron; it’s the more powerful Chiron, its 8.0-liter engine making 1578 ponies to the base car’s 1,479. Those extra horses help the car crack 300 miles per hour, at least in the form of the even-more-limited Chiron Super Sport 300+. Sadly, “regular” Super Sports are affixed with an irremovable speed limiter, restricting this Bugatti to a top speed of merely … 273 mph.

It’s also absolutely stunning

bugatti chiron super sport blue and silver

The Bugatti Chiron improves on its Veyron predecessor in many ways, but appearance is perhaps the most obvious one. The Veyron certainly looked unique and exotic — it was impossible to mistake for anything else — but beautiful, it was not.

The Chiron is another story, especially in Super Sport guise. The Super Sport — which, after doing so in my first draft of the story, I recommend not abbreviating down to its initials — boasts a longer tail in order to help it reach its outrageous top speed, but that feature that also makes the car look impossibly low and lengthy, like a scaled-down Acela locomotive. (I attempted to photograph it with the spoiler down, but my chaperone informed me the mighty engine was still too hot and it needed the extra ventilation provided by having the wing up.)

The Chiron even manages to feel special inside

Plop down inside the Chiron, and it takes a second to realize that something’s missing: an infotainment system. There’s no color TV in the middle of the dash, no radio display above the gearstick — no screen at all, it seems.

Ah, but look closer, and that’s not entirely true: there are, in fact, several teeny-tiny screens, one inside each of the four knobs that control different functions of the climate control. (The screens, oddly, show driving info, like gear position and current speed.) But none of those handle the stereo or anything beyond that; only the driver has power over those, using the Game Boy controller on the steering wheel’s 3-o’clock stalk.

There’s also a pair of small color screens on the instrument panel; one on the left serves primarily as tachometer and current power gauge, while the right one shows navigation, stereo or a variety of other info. Both flank the main event: a central, 300-mile-per-hour analog speedometer. You will spend most of your life only using one-third of it.

The seats, meanwhile, are plenty comfortable once you situate yourself inside — a task made a little tricky by the car’s low stance. The craftsmanship, though, stands out even more than the comfort; every piece fits like it belongs in a Rolex, and looks absolutely exquisite. My test car was painted in classy-yet-muted shades of blue, but rest assured, Bugatti can do just about anything you want inside to show off your preferences.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the sound that comes into the cabin: a boisterous, industrial mix of roars and whooshes and thrums that leaves you wondering why you’d even bother fiddling with the stereo. Let off the gas, and the blowoff valves sigh like a tiny locomotive letting off steam.

Granted, it’s spectacle like that that distracts the pragmatic sort from realizing what this hypercar lacks. Apple CarPlay, adaptive cruise control, ventilated seats … in all honesty, a top-shelf Honda Accord packs far more “convenience” features than this Bugatti. Then again, if you own a Chiron, you already have plenty of other cars that have all those features and more. Which brings us to one final point…

It’s impossible to say whether it’s worth $3.8 million

Or, to be more precise, $4.3 million as tested, thanks to an options list alone that racks up a price tag capable of creating an epic garage. That is, on the face of it, admittedly absurd.

The aforementioned 911 Turbo S not only matches the Chiron Super Sport to 60, it clings to the road even more tenaciously, offers arguably an even greater blend of luxury and sportiness — and you could buy close to 19 of them for the price of one longtail Chiron. A Bentley Continental GT Speed offers arguably even higher quality and still-outrageous performance. A Lamborghini Revuelto or Ferrari 812 Superfast will catch eyes just as well, and offer levels of go-fast that are equally overwhelming for public roads.

In fact, the moment you try to look at this car from any sort of value proposition, any attempt to justify its price simply collapses. Stick the value of this car in a brokerage account at five percent interest, and you could live a comfortable life off the $210,000 a year you’d make before taxes. If you won $4.3 million in the lottery, you could buy a million-dollar house, fill a garage with a million dollars worth of cars, set aside enough money to pay taxes and insurance and maintenance on all of that for the next 20 years, and still have cash left over — all for the price of one Bugatti.

But to view it that way is to utterly miss the point. Modern Bugattis exist in a different realm — one of gigayachts with their own accompanying megayachts and personal fleets of private jets and all those other aspects of life owned and craved by the people who show up in the pages of Puck. It is a post-rational car for a post-rational age.

To be an adult means being able to hold two competing ideas in your head at the same time. So while I may have all sorts of thoughts about the socioeconomic circumstances and income inequality that have arisen to enable a world where a rarefied few can afford such things as $4 million cars while nearly a tenth of the planet lives on less than $2.15 a day … I will always remain thankful that a vehicle so beautiful, so mechanically exquisite, so technologically advanced and so insanely high-performing as the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport exists at all.

I will always appreciate it as the high-water mark of more than a century of automotive advancement — the sum of the hopes and dreams and blood and sweat and tears of every engineer and designer and product planner and executive and janitor who cares about their work because they worked in a place that built cars. Cars with pulsing, breathing engines that sucked in air and fuel that came from living things, turned it into energy and exhaled greenhouse gases, just like we do. Cars that thrummed and thumped as though they had hearts, and perhaps even souls.

Cars that felt alive, just like us.