Bugatti through the Ages: The Most Iconic Cars from the French Marque

The first marque to view the automobile as art, Bugatti has created an unmatched portfolio of brilliant brushstrokes since its inception in 1909. From hand-hewn, horse-drawn carriages to the world’s fastest production car, elegance in design and execution has been de rigueur over the decades.

“Bugatti may be the world’s greatest automaker. In the 1920s and 30s it certainly was. No other company could match the marque’s combination of engineering brilliance and beauty,” says Peter Mullin, renowned collector and founder of the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, Calif. “The way that founder Ettore Bugatti and later his son Jean set the car’s proportions are still strikingly beautiful today, perhaps even more so than in their own time.”

Here is a retrospective of Bugatti throughout its 107-year history; a look at vehicles imbued with the French brand’s je ne sais quoi and crafted from Ettore’s philosophy that “nothing is too beautiful, nothing is too expensive.”