Top Gear's Ollie Marriage spent a day at Bugatti with Mate Rimac, who drove while Marriage rode along. His verdict on the 1,800-horsepower hybrid's naturally aspirated V16: he has never experienced anything like it.
The most anticipated engine in the car world finally has an audience outside Bugatti. On Oct 25, 2026, Top Gear posted a 28-minute YouTube video, Flat Out In The 1800hp V16 Bugatti Tourbillon!, along with a written report by Ollie Marriage on topgear.com. It's the first in-depth look from inside a Tourbillon on public roads that we've seen from a major outlet.
There's one catch, and Top Gear is upfront about it. Marriage didn't drive. Bugatti boss Mate Rimac drove, and Marriage rode in the passenger seat, out of Molsheim, through the surrounding villages and into the forests and hills of the Vosges in eastern France. "Next time though, I'll get to drive it," Marriage says at the end of the video. Even from the passenger seat, his verdict is clear: "I've never experienced anything like this V16."
The Tourbillon replaces the Chiron and drops the quad-turbo W16 engine that powered every modern Bugatti since the Veyron. According to the Bugatti Newsroom and Top Gear:
Marriage adds a detail that explains a lot about the car: the V16, its gearbox and the rear electric motor together weigh about the same as the old W16 engine on its own, roughly 430 kg (about 950 lb). Rimac is proud that the Tourbillon is a hybrid that weighs less than the gas-only car it replaces, though he admits in the video that the difference is "just a few kilos."
At first, the new car feels familiar, Marriage writes, with the same deep, floor-shaking throb as the W16. Then, at around 3,000 rpm, everything changes. "Now the powerlifter has been exchanged for a track athlete," he writes. "Less outright power maybe, but more explosive, quicker reactions, higher limits."
Once the camera car pulled over and Rimac could use everything, Marriage says the experience is "all V16," with the electric motors supporting the engine rather than taking over. The sound is the star. He describes a hiss as air rushes in, then a section that sounds "like a pair of V8s in stereo," and finally a top end "where it's like you've been swarmed by superbikes." With the windows down, "it's a whole other level."
Honestly, even compared to the Nevera, this feels so fast.
— Mate Rimac, to Top Gear
On paper the Nevera, Rimac's nearly 2,000-horsepower electric hypercar, is still quicker to 124 mph: Top Gear lists 4.4 seconds for the Nevera, 5.0 for the Tourbillon and 6.1 for the Chiron. Marriage's point is that the noise is what makes the Tourbillon feel faster. Rimac told him Bugatti did nothing to shape that sound: no tuning of the engine or exhaust for noise, no pipes channeling it into the cabin, and nothing played through the speakers. He compares the metallic intake sound to the BMW M3 CSL of the early 2000s. Of all the engines Marriage has experienced, he says only the V12 in Gordon Murray's T.50 beats it.
The video spends a lot of time on how the Tourbillon's power is split. There are three powertrain modes:
Rimac also explains a feature born from his frustration with other hybrids. Pull the organ-stop starter and the engine stays on, without switching itself on and off. The battery is kept at about 85% so the electric boost is always there. He says he owns a Ferrari SF90, a three-motor hybrid supercar, and that driving it gave him "a long list of things" he didn't want in his own car.
Then there's the drifting. In rear-drive mode Rimac slides the car through a corner on camera. "Every car that I'm involved in has to be able to drift very well," he says in the video. In Top Gear's written piece, he recalls engineers telling him that wasn't "a key Bugatti attribute." His answer: "it is now."
Before the drive, Rimac gives Marriage a tour of Molsheim, including the new La Manufacture building next to the original Atelier where every Veyron and Chiron was built. Both buildings were still largely empty during the visit. Rimac says the new building can triple Molsheim's production capacity. "We are not going to go into like squeezing the brand and producing thousands of cars," he says, "but we just don't want our customers to wait six years on their cars." Top Gear reports current waits of more than three years.
Each Tourbillon starts in Zagreb, where Rimac's company makes body panels and carbon fiber parts, paints them and begins assembling the chassis. Final assembly, interior and quality checks happen in Molsheim. Rimac says series production there starts "in a few weeks," and that the car on the drive was about 95% finished, with the remaining work mostly in software.
Other details from the tour:
Rimac is blunt about how customers first react to the hybrid system. "They're like, 'We don't want hybrid,'" he says, calling the resistance almost a "religion." His argument is that the motors are there to make the engine possible, not the other way around. Many hybrids use electric motors as a reason to fit a smaller engine. Bugatti used them to replace turbos and keep a huge, naturally aspirated V16.
We didn't make this a hybrid because we really wanted a hybrid.
— Mate Rimac, in Top Gear's video
It's the same view Rimac has held since 2022, when he argued with Volkswagen and Porsche against making the Chiron's successor fully electric. We covered that story last week in The Electric Hypercar Pioneer Who Saved Bugatti's V16. In the video he says he started the project about six years ago with a 3D model of the car and took it to Volkswagen. Some customers told him it was a terrible idea, and he admits he wondered whether he was "blinded by my own idea." "Now after all of this," he says, "I think we really nailed it."
He also hints at what comes next. The Tourbillon is a platform, he says, and won't be the last car built on it. Asked whether a lighter version with a manual gearbox is possible, he answers, "Absolutely," and talks about moving away from Bugatti's "sledgehammer" approach of the last 20 years toward something closer to the brand's lightweight 1920s Type 35. Top Gear also expects a roadster.
Not yet, as far as we can find. Top Gear's ride appears to be the first in-depth report from a major outlet. Before this, most of what the public had seen came from Bugatti itself, including its own videos of hot-weather testing near Seville (Oct 8, 2026) and winter testing in Sweden (May 7, 2026). Proper drives from the driver's seat, and the first customer handovers, are the next things to watch.
The most telling thing in this video isn't a number. It's that the man who built his name on electric hypercars spends most of the drive showing off the engine, switching off the electric motors so his passenger can hear the V16 on its own, and then drifting it. Marriage calls Rimac "a paid up member of the combustion club," and it's hard to argue.
It's still only a passenger ride, with the company's boss at the wheel, so it isn't a full review. The real tests are a proper drive and, later, what owners and the resale market make of it. But if the noise is half as good as Marriage says, Bugatti may have found its answer to a question the whole hypercar world is facing: when every fast electric car can match the acceleration, the experience is what people pay for.
Volkswagen wanted an electric successor to the Chiron. Mate Rimac, the man who built the nearly 2,000-horsepower Nevera, fought to keep combustion alive.
Hendrik A. Malinowski, a 14-year Bugatti veteran and former managing director, is now chief commercial officer of Bugatti Rimac, with sales, aftersales, customer experience, the dealer network and brand and marketing all reporting to him.
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