Bugatti Chiron Super Sport (2022 - ) review

It’s pretty hard to get beyond the staggering 3.2m euros (£2.8m) plus local taxes asking price for the Chiron Super Sport in order even to consider the running costs. But if you do … you’ll want to fly to the brand’s chateau to commission it, the W16 engine drinks fuel with an unparalleled thirst, insurance bills are sky high, you’ll need to garage it, leave it with valets rather than risk parking it yourself, get your bespoke paint job touched up by hand when it’s chipped by gravel, and have it tenderly administered to by your local Bugatti man when the frightening service comes around. Still want it? It’s all yours

Previous ownership by Volkswagen, and recent acquisition by a joint venture between Porsche and electric hypercar specialists Rimac, stands Bugatti in good stead here, given its products are assured access to a formidable range of R&D resource. Accurate data in terms of reliability is hard to come by, however, because only 99 will be made and Bugatti-owning multi-millionaires aren’t renowned for filling in the annual What Car? reliability survey. Plus, most Super Sports don’t get driven more than a few hundred miles every year. We’re giving it top marks, on the basis that if you throw enough money at it, as Chiron Super Sport owners will, anything is fixable. And you get a four-year warranty, and you probably get a marvellous cup of tea while you wait.

It’s relative, admittedly but the Chiron Super Sport does not have the forward (or rearward) vision of, say, a Land Rover Discovery. But, for a hypercar, it does have a decent all-round view, and it has truly unbelievable levels of grip, which we found out during a moment of right-footed exuberance and was swiftly followed by appreciation of the incredible braking. There’s stability control and ABS but, er, not a lot else. A blind-spot warning system wouldn’t have gone amiss. But we have to say, the Chiron doesn’t feel as easy to stack in a hedge as some other mega high-performance cars we’ve driven. So it can have three points.

The Chiron is as wide as a river, flowing unstoppable along the road and almost impossible to place accurately in its lane. The upside of all that is a huge amount of space for its two passengers. Happy days: you can eat burgers and drive Bugattis. No, but it really is comfy, with supple suspension that doesn’t jiggle your jowls - a pleasant surprise in a hypercar that lives and breathes speed. A Chiron Super Sport could be your daily driver, if it weren’t for the thorny issue of parking it anywhere, ever. There’s a tiny, weeny bit of storage space, but seeing as average annual mileage is 800, you won’t be straying far from home anyway. We also love the C-shaped pillar that curves from seat to ceiling down the middle, splitting the cabin in two, cocooning each occupant in their own haze of opulence.

There’s a GT aura inside the Chiron Super Sport in that it feels less like penance in pursuit of performance, and more like an actual usable car. Which is slightly disappointing. Four knobs in a vertical stack in the centre show temperature, heated seat settings and the rest through one digital read out but press them again and the same small glass displays show performance figures from your latest journey. Including - ahem - top speed reached. The best feature is a “speed key” - a heavy silver lozenge in its own pocket by the driver's door. Press one end to release it, flip it open and plug it into the little slot and, after running through safety checks, the car will unlock its true top speed of 273mph. You can also plug your smartphone in and, well, what else did you want?

What’s a century’s worth of internal-combustion engine development for, if not appreciating one of the world’s last 16-cylinder, quad-turbocharged, planet-destroying, physics-dismissing, velocity-harnessing engines in full battle cry? We’re talking 1,600 horsepower, 1,600Nm of torque and 0-62mph in 2.4 seconds. It felt faster, too. We got to a bit of empty private road in a European country (disclaimer done) and, breath held, pushed that throttle pedal. Dear god. A day later, we were able to ascertain that we’ve never been in anything that powerful and never will again. Not in the world of cars, anyway. It took that long to process what had happened. But really, the Chiron is amazing because of its traction control. In the split second before you hit the gas, you figure you simply can’t do it, because previous experiences in other cars had the tyres squirming for grip when so much power goes through them. But the Chiron just spools up and the rubber digs in for as long as your nerve does. Needless to say, we lifted off long before we'd even got close to half of the car's true abilities. But the weirdest bit is that you can also trundle it round town at 30mph like it’s an Audi R8, its not-too-distant cousin. And we’re not sure if that’s a good thing which, in the final analysis, is why this isn’t a five-star car. It’s truly immense in every way. But soulful, romantic or lyrical, it is not.