Bugatti burns VWAG's cash, loses more than $6.27 million on every Veyron sold.
This is actually true, but guess how many investors in VWAG actually cared? Not as many as you think. The Veyron was Ferdinand Piech's moonshot. It was the automotive Concorde. The physics involved are sort of nuts[1], especially when you consider it was developed in the late 90s and went into production over a decade ago. The R&D costs were ludicrous. They nearly burnt down the engine design building because the immense heat the engine spewed out on the test rig... yet still had to find ways to dissipate that much heat in actual use. It was considered an engineering and research exercise that could defray some of its costs.
This isn't much different. New automotive production line and models costing serious money up front? I'm going to die from a lack of surprise.
[1] Consider a valve stem cap. They're aluminum, and weigh ~1g. However at near 400kph, because of the centripetal force of the wheel, they effectively weigh 7.5kg at those speeds. They also had to redesign the schrader valves so they wouldn't deflate at those speeds. They also had to create new TPMS sensors because even Porsche's -- which were rated for around 350kph -- damn near disintegrated past 375kph.
7.5kgf centripetal force for a 1g mass just doesn't seem right. The math checks out though, and tells me that I'm unable to intuit the forces involved at 250+ Mph.
At that speed, the wheels are spinning at over 4,000 RPM. I wonder what machine is used to balance those wheels...
This is actually true, but guess how many investors in VWAG actually cared? Not as many as you think. The Veyron was Ferdinand Piech's moonshot. It was the automotive Concorde. The physics involved are sort of nuts[1], especially when you consider it was developed in the late 90s and went into production over a decade ago. The R&D costs were ludicrous. They nearly burnt down the engine design building because the immense heat the engine spewed out on the test rig... yet still had to find ways to dissipate that much heat in actual use. It was considered an engineering and research exercise that could defray some of its costs.
This isn't much different. New automotive production line and models costing serious money up front? I'm going to die from a lack of surprise.
[1] Consider a valve stem cap. They're aluminum, and weigh ~1g. However at near 400kph, because of the centripetal force of the wheel, they effectively weigh 7.5kg at those speeds. They also had to redesign the schrader valves so they wouldn't deflate at those speeds. They also had to create new TPMS sensors because even Porsche's -- which were rated for around 350kph -- damn near disintegrated past 375kph.