The Last Bugatti W16 Has Been Built And It Marks The End Of A Hypercar Legend

Some cars become legends. So do some engines, and Bugatti’s W16 is one of them.

The company’s 8.0-litre quad-turbocharged W16 has been one of the great engineering achievements in road car history for more than 20 years.

It powered the Veyron that rewrote the hypercar rulebook, the Chiron that pushed performance further again, and every major Bugatti that followed.

Now that the run has officially ended. Bugatti has unveiled the 99th and final Mistral, the last series production car that will ever leave the company’s historic Molsheim atelier with a W16 behind its seats.

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The Engine That Changed Everything

When Volkswagen revived the French marque in the late 1990s, it set out to build a car nobody thought was possible. The result was the Veyron.

Launched with 1,001 horsepower, the Veyron became the world’s fastest production car and reset what people expected from a road-legal machine.

Every Bugatti since the Chiron, Divo, Centodieci, Bolide and finally the Mistral, carried that engine forward.

The W16 itself was unlike anything else on the road. Its unusual W-shaped layout packed 16 cylinders into a surprisingly compact package, and four turbochargers delivered serious power without much drama. It became as recognisable a Bugatti trademark as the horseshoe grille or the blue paintwork.

A Fitting Farewell

The final Mistral is appropriately named The Last Of Its Kind. Finished in a two-tone Pearl and Sparkle paint job, the roadster gets a Magnolia and Grey Carbon Matt leather interior, with the signature of Bugatti founder Ettore Bugatti stitched into each headrest. It is as much a collector’s piece as a hypercar.

Underneath, though, sits the real star. The W16 now produces 1,578 horsepower and 1,180 lb-ft of torque, enough to launch the open-top Mistral from 0 to 62 mph in 2.4 seconds and on to 282 mph.

That figure is not theoretical. In 2024, a specially prepared Mistral set the world record for the fastest open-top production car ever built. The W16 had one final milestone left, and it hit that too.

One Era Ends, A New One Begins

Bugatti is not abandoning big engines altogether. Its next car, the Tourbillon, swaps turbochargers for a naturally aspirated V16 paired with three electric motors.

It is the biggest technical pivot the company has made yet, trading forced induction for electric motors bolted to a bigger engine.

Even so, the W16 will remain unmatched. Few engines get two decades at the top of the performance world, and fewer still become cultural icons.

There is, technically, one small loophole. Bugatti says ultra-wealthy collectors can still commission one-off W16-powered creations through its Programme Solitaire division, whose first bespoke projects already feature the same engine.

Everyone else, though, is done. The story ends here. The final Mistral caps off one of the most remarkable production engines the auto industry has ever built.

Hypercar makers will keep chasing bigger numbers. They may never build another engine quite like this one.