Bugatti's W-16 Engine: The Story Behind Its Unusual Design

Eight, 10, and 12-cylinder engines are well known, with the latter two being typically reserved for supercars like the Lexus LFA or a Mercedes-AMG. However, only Bugatti has managed to make a modern 16-cylinder engine, and it isn't in the typical V-formation everyone is familiar with. It's in a "W" layout, with each engine bank featuring two distinct lines of four cylinders. Variations of the engine powered some of the fastest cars ever made, like the Bugatti Veyron and Bugatti Chiron, and it's not at all unusual to see Bugatti's outlandish quad-turbocharged engines produce more than 1,500 horsepower. That sort of astronomical figure is typically seen in aircrafts, much less street-legal production cars. 

But Bugatti didn't just come up with the wacky engine design overnight, and the engine in the most recent iteration of the Chiron has roots dating all the way back to 1997 with a design sketched on an envelope by Ferdinand Piëch, Volkswagen's then-chairman of the board of management. According to the story, it was chosen to be a 16-cylinder engine as Ettore Bugatti, the brand's founder, engineered his own 16-cylinder powerplant several decades earlier.

Bugatti went with the "W" layout as it wanted the engine to fit within the same general footprint as a V12 and have less weight than what a hypothetical modern V16 would weigh. It's still a behemoth at a displacement of over 8-liters. It was first tested in any capacity in 2001 after a solid four years of trying to build it. The engine didn't even have a car to host it until it was revealed alongside the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 in 2005. Bentley, a part of Volkswagen Group since 1998, developed its own W-engine, a W12 that saw cars like the Continental GT. 

The W16 deserves a spot in the pantheon of wacky supercar engines, like the massive 8.4-liter V10 in the Dodge Viper, Lamborghini's venerable 6.5-liter V12, and the impossibly small and high-revving 4.8-liter V10 in the Lexus LFA. While Bugatti is saying goodbye to the W16, it's still one of the fastest commercial car engines ever built. In 2005, the W16 launched the Veyron to over 250 miles per hour. In 2019, the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+, powered by an improved W16, hit just over 304 miles per hour.