BUGATTI — A NEW ERA： Hybrid Power

Welcome to the Bugatti Tourbillon VP production. VP stands for Validation Prototype. In general, we have three big phases in the development of the car. XP is Experimental Prototypes, that's the camouflage prototypes that you could see running around for the last couple of years. Now we are in the second phase, the VP phase, where the car needs to be 90-95% done. You can still do some small changes going forward, but that's basically it. That's the project, that's the status where we are now in. And then the next phase is the pre-series phase, where there is no more changes. So now we need to take all the learnings from XP and VP, but what we want to show you today is the powertrain system and dive deep into the hybrid and combustion engine of this car. The interesting story behind that is that the electric powertrain, being very high tech, very high performance, is actually enabling this very emotional combustion engine. And they complement each other, where the electric powertrain gives the low-end performance and fast response time and the four-wheel drive with the front electric axle. And the combustion engine gives, of course, the longer-term performance and the emotions, the sound, the revs that we all love. Here in front of us, we have the whole rear powertrain system. This is what's powering the rear wheels, which consists of the V16 naturally aspirated engine, eight-speed double-clutch transmission with a torque vectoring e-diff in the rear, one electric 250 kilowatt motor with 24,000 rpm maximum speed, and this whole thing weighs 430 kilos. So in total, the powertrain without the battery is quite a lot lighter compared to the Chiron of the engine and the gearbox of the Chiron. Electric motors are pretty incredible things. This little motor here can develop far over 300 horsepower and together with the gearbox, it does a lot of things. So the way we reduce weight is by integration. For example, this is also the starter motor. So there is no 12-volt starter motor. We start the engine with 800 volts with this electric motor. It also acts as a generator. Let's say if the battery is depleted and you want to charge the battery not from the grid but from the engine, it acts as a generator while the car is either standing still or driving, and of course it supports the combustion engine whenever you drive. So let's say when you hit the throttle and you are at low rpm with the combustion engine, in a combustion-only sports car, even if it's a very powerful car, you need either to wait a long time for the turbos to spool up, that can be a few seconds even, especially with a big engine, or you would need to shift down two, three, four gears to get into the rev range where the combustion engine can deliver its performance. With this electric motor you don't need that because this motor has a completely different torque characteristic compared to the combustion engine. So where the combustion engine is weak, the electric motor is strong. So you don't need to shift down, there is no turbo lag, you get the performance immediately with the roar of a V16 naturally aspirated engine. And then in the front of the car there is no more gearbox here in front of the engine, the gearbox is now behind, but now we have a battery here which is in a T-shape. Three years ago we started the development of the first hybrid powertrain for the new era of Bugatti vehicles. The journey started from a blank sheet of paper, the development set ambitious targets such as the highest level of integration inside the vehicles and the highest performance available on the market. We also adopted in this architecture a motorsport cooling concept, having oil directly cooling the cells, this to maximise the performance. Here we have one of the first development prototypes of the battery. The battery design has this unique shape to achieve two main goals. One is to keep the centre of gravity of the whole vehicle low. The second one is to enhance the integration inside the monocoque. We used to call this T-shape, but the main peculiarity of this architecture is the absence of a cover. One of the main targets of the project was to keep the weight as low as possible. So from there we started developing the idea of using the complete vehicle as a battery cover. The battery architecture is based on 800 volt systems. We have more than 1500 cells, allowing us to have an EV drive range of more than 60 kilometres and a total peak power of around 700 kilowatts. On this front panel we can see how the battery looks like while installed inside the vehicle. So basically this panel is part of the vehicle itself, while the battery is coming from underneath and the connection for both the cooling channels where the oil flows, the high voltage and other signals is happening blindly, so through internal connection. And then the independent front electric axle with two electric motors. As I mentioned already, very high speed, very high tech electric motors with two gearboxes in one housing. Here it looks like a differential housing or basically one housing, but it's actually two independent systems so that each electric motor is connected to its own wheel. So we wanted to have the cooling for the hybrid system and the combustion engine in the front, we wanted to have more luggage space and we wanted to have an electric front axle in the front. So that's a packaging marvel and that was really difficult to do.