From the September/October 2026 issue of Car and Driver.
Money does not always equal quality. I’ve driven some expensive cars that were terrible. Now that I think about it, proportionally I’ve probably spent more time with broken supercars than I have with jalopies, and as you know if you read this column, I’ve spent a lot of time with borked jalopies.
When you get behind the wheel of something that costs many times your annual salary, you tend to be a lot more critical when switches fall off or windows won’t roll up. In a cheap car, you’re just like, “Oh yeah, that’s the window-down side. Here’s a raincoat, and while you’re sitting over there, do you mind popping out now and then with this squeegee? That’s also the no-windshield-wiper side.”
If I add up the value of the cars I drive for work, an average month probably sees me rotate through $100,000 to $200,000 worth of new sheetmetal. That looks like a big number until you realize I’m usually driving a different vehicle every week, and one heavily optioned pickup truck can carry a six-digit price all by itself.
Last month was not average. Instead of the usual trucks and compact SUVs, I ended up with a series of hypercar and heritage-collection assignments that resulted in my driving $10 million worth of automobiles. Of that, about $6 million was accounted for by just two rides: a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport and a long-admired dream car, the Lamborghini Miura. If that makes you lightheaded, then imagine how I felt pulling out into traffic.
The Bugatti Veyron, with its 1001-hp quad-turbo 8.0-liter W-16, was the first production car to cross the 250-mph mark. Its purchase price of over $1.2 million made it one of the most expensive new cars you could buy in 2005. When the Super Sport came out in 2010, it bumped the horsepower to 1200 and the price to $2.4 million. Four-digit horsepower isn’t exactly common now but has certainly become more accessible since then. These days you can park 1000 horses in your driveway for what a Veyron owner might spend on a wheel-and-tire change.
But there’s cachet in owning the car that had it first. A Tesla Model S Plaid just doesn’t turn heads the way a Bugatti does. The market for used Veyrons is so hot that Bugatti even offers services to re-spec your Veyron should your auction purchase not suit your garage’s color palette. If you’re in the market to change your Veyron’s interior hue, contact your local Bugatti dealer (and let me know if you’re looking to adopt a middle-aged auto journalist).
What does millions of dollars drive like? Weirdly low-key in the Veyron. Its round profile gives it the subtle sparkle of a cabochon star sapphire in contrast to the flashy angles of other hypercars. The interior, too, is understated—no screens, no menu of complex performance modes. The left side of the cluster contains the only reminder of this car’s record-breaking mission: a power gauge that chugged along sullenly in its lower quarter as I slid the Bugatti through beachside traffic. It felt less jumpy than modern machines with their electric assist and instant torque. The W-16 offered a smooth confidence that made the Veyron unlike any other car I’ve driven. It’s astonishing, but not how I’d spend millions of dollars.
The reason the Bugatti isn’t on my shopping list is because I would have already spent my hypothetical multimillions on the other star of my big-money month, the Lamborghini Miura. The Miura is like the Rolling Stones, Hitchcock, or Caravaggio. When someone knowledgeable about music, cinema, or art asks what’s your favorite, those are safe answers, undeniably good. Such is this Lamborghini in car circles. Nobody is ever going to say, “The Miura? Why do you like that gorgeous swoopy shape with its flirty eyelashes, gated shifter, and radical mid-mounted transverse V-12?” Even non–car people, when shown a photo, immediately understand. It looks amazing, somehow both elegant and friendly. It sounds like a wolf pack under a full moon, with a melodic howl that just gets better with each shift until you almost forget that this car has a tendency to get light in the front end and catch on fire if it feels like it. Hey, nobody’s perfect.
It’s unlikely I’ll be buying a Veyron or a Miura, so it’s a good thing I still enjoy more affordable automotive experiences. If I want to shift gears in a swoopy orange import, there’s always my Opel GT, a drive in which would’ve brought my total for the month up to $10,003,000.
Like a sleeper agent activated late in the game, Elana Scherr didn’t know her calling at a young age. Like many girls, she planned to be a vet-astronaut-artist, and came closest to that last one by attending UCLA art school. She painted images of cars, but did not own one. Elana reluctantly got a driver’s license at age 21 and discovered that she not only loved cars and wanted to drive them, but that other people loved cars and wanted to read about them, which meant somebody had to write about them. Since receiving activation codes, Elana has written for numerous car magazines and websites, covering classics, car culture, technology, motorsports, and new-car reviews. In 2020, she received a Best Feature award from the Motor Press Guild for the C/D story “A Drive through Classic Americana in a Polestar 2.” In 2023, her Car and Driver feature story “In Washington, D.C.’s Secret Carpool Cabal, It’s a Daily Slug Fest” was awarded 1st place in the 16th Annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club.
Source: www.caranddriver.com
