Car Throttle

I'm back in North Carolina now, where you can swing a dead cat without hitting a Bentley.  On one hand, it sucks.  I like seeing exotics constantly.  On the other, it's nice that exotics remain exotic. I walked around LA the whole time with my camera around my neck for you guys - so I'll continue now with day two and three of car spotting in LA.  Hope you enjoy it! Classic cars, especially older Japanese cars, seem to have a much longer shelf life in California's relatively mild, dry climate.  This 240Z would have a lot more rust bubbles over here in North Carolina.  I could do without the period window louvers, but YMMV. You could do worse for your commute than driving an

Sometimes I realize I have a certain lack of perspective when it comes to the car thing.  Perhaps it's a regional thing.  I'm in Los Angeles for a few days (a family member is getting married), and some of the cars that raise eyebrows in Raleigh would be taxis around here.  If there's an area in the US that embraces car culture more fully than the city of Angels, I'm not sure what it is.  This is a place where a C-class Mercedes is like a Taurus, and you routinely see more than ten Bentleys a day.  It's special.  My shutter finger has been getting tired.  Check it out. See, in the middle of the eastern seaboard, a CL55 AMG Supercharged is the kind of

Take two "B's" - Beyoncé and Bugatti and combine them in a music video. What do you get? A party. literally. In this ghetto-themed video, Beyoncé does some cooking, blows some bubbles and wears some revealing outfits. Nothing out of the ordinary then. But I thought you told the world you were pregnant, B? If so someone has either been very generous with AfterEffects or this video has been a long time in the making. We out in Abu Dhabi, We like to party, We don’t cause trouble, We just ride Bugatti American rapper J. Cole, who incidentally is signed to Beyoncé's music mogul husband, Jay-Z's record label RocNation, is the lucky sod who gets to ride around in a two-tone blue-on-black Bugatti Veyron 16.4. With standard 12 spoke alloy wheels

It's true.  It's part of the human psyche.  In a battle between David and Goliath, people are always going to hope that the slingshot wielding man takes down the towering beast.  Perhaps it's the societal interpretation of "Rage Against The Machine."  People want to see the scrawny midget kick the stuffing out of the club bouncer. And so it is, I believe, with cars.  Or at least it seems to be that way.  Case in point:  Nissan's GT-R.  Now, this is not to say that the GT-R is a Pygmy in a room full of Amazons, or extraordinarily cheap.  In fact, if you point your browser over to Nissan's website, you'll see that $89,950 is required to put a new GT-R in your driveway.  If

You want exclusive? Bugatti will give you exclusive. Not only have they repeatedly built the world's fastest car in the form of the Veyron 16.4 and then the Veyron Super Sport, but now the high flying brand have come out with the L'Or Blanc at Frankfurt, which is now the world's most exclusive car. Believe it or not, the L'Or Blanc is partly made from porcelain (a world first) but at $2.5 million, it's probably the most expensive piece of crockery you'll ever see. Porcelain has been applied everywhere from parts of the interior behind the seats and on the dash, all the way through to the engine oil cap, wheel caps and fuel tank cap. More pictures of the standard Veyron Grand Sport below.

In 2009, Bugatti showed off its 16C Galibier Concept, a preview of a future high-performance luxury sedan. Instead of showing it at the Geneva Show, the company held a private event just ahead of the event. This was due to the fact that the head of Bugatti didn't like showing vehicles that might not be produced. However, all indications have pointed to production for the car, as it has been shown to prospective clients and dealers to gauge interest since its introduction. Since then Powered by the same 8.0-liter 16-cylinder as the Veyron, the 16C Galibier would be the world's fastest production sedan. That would enable Bugatti to claim yet another record in addition to the world's fastest production car title it holds with the Veyron. Make

I recently read some news on Auto Express that the next Bugatti Veyron will hit 270mph. This is extremely good news to those who think that 250mph is still slightly pedestrian and extremely bad news to those politically correct spoilsports. Whatever the reason, this has got me thinking again about the big Bug and what it means to motoring and basically humanity as a whole. To those that do not agree, please do tell me one significant engineering achievement that blew your mind away. The Three Gorges Dam? It's just concrete blocking a very large river. The Taipei 101? It's just another tall building that will be replaced by another (has it been replaced? No matter, it isn't important). I honestly can say that aside from

If you're into cars, or hell, even if you're not, "Zero to Sixty" is a phrase you hear all the time. It's become such a standard phrase it has worked its way into everyday conversation, and media not even loosely related to automobiles.  Hell, there is (or, err, was) a whole magazine called 0-60.  At least in the United States and the UK, 0-60mph has become the standard measure of acceleration.  But why?  And really, why do we care? If common sense prevailed, the standard measure of a car's performance would really be it's power-to-weight ratio.  Nothing determines how a car performs in a straight line more directly than how much it weighs, divided by how much power it has.  Why?  Well, a 500bhp vehicle

Just how far would you go to restore a car? Would you dive to the bottom of a frickin' lake and haul an old wreck of a car just to resurrect it like Lazarus? You would, or at least I would, if it was a 1925 Bugatti. And that's just what some total nut jobs, er, I mean, dedicated gearheads will be doing. When I was a little kid, my dad found a Kaiser Darrin in barn (no, literally in a barn) that was all there, but needed to be gone through and completely restored. Let me just put it this way: There was hay in the engine compartment. But by the time he got through with it (my dad, being a tool and die maker

It has been a little while since we've heard about the Bugatti 16C Galibier. The car was introduced at its own private event last year after Frankfurt, with Bugatti head Franz-Josef Paefgen stating the reason as him not liking to see cars at auto shows that weren't in the works to be built. We agree, especially when cars like the Bugatti 16C Galibier aren't built. The good news is that it seems as if the 16C Galibier will be produced. For one, we've heard rumors about a greenlight. Secondly, time is ticking on Bugatti's ability to keep extending the Veyron run with new special editions - a new model is clearly needed. Thirdly, the company has decided to release more pictures of the car months later