Unveiled in 2022, the Mistral is the final street-legal Bugatti powered by the quad-turbocharged W16 engine. It’s related to the Chiron, but the two cars are different enough that the French brand built test mules to put the roadster through its paces before launching production.
While some hypercars can only be registered in the United States under the Show and Display rule, Bugatti wanted the Mistral — its first convertible since 2015 — to be fully street-legal in every major market. It re-engineered the monocoque during the development phase and notably reinforced the sills and the transmission tunnel, so it needed to put the model through a series of crash tests
Aerodynamic tests were completed in October 2023, and the 1,600-horsepower W16 engine was extensively tested on a dyno before it was signed off. The road-testing phase of the project has started: Bugatti is testing the Mistral on and off the track, on different road surfaces, at different elevations, and in wildly different weather ranging from freezing cold to scorching hot. One of its development mules has already covered nearly 20,000 miles, and it will rack up an additional 5,000 miles in the coming months including roughly 3,000 miles on a track.
If that doesn’t sound like much, consider this: Bugatti notes that most of its modern-day cars haven’t reached the 25,000-mile mark yet.