Volkswagen Group approved production in 2001, but development ran four years past its original target as Bugatti and Volkswagen’s engineers worked through problems that a car with this specification had never had to solve before: an engine that could run flat-out for hours without failing, tyres rated for over 400 km/h, and enough cooling for a 1,000 PS-plus engine mounted just behind the cabin.[1] The result set an independently measured top speed record on Volkswagen’s own Ehra-Lessien track in April 2005, before the car had even gone on sale.
The 2010 Super Sport pushed the same basic W16 further, to a Guinness World Records-confirmed 431.07 km/h, a record later passed to Bugatti’s own Chiron. Both trims share a single published 0-100 km/h figure in Wikipedia’s own performance table, credited jointly to the “Standard, Grand Sport” and “Super Sport, Grand Sport Vitesse” pairs rather than broken out per trim, which this entry records as given rather than inventing a faster number for the more powerful car.
