Bugatti bicycle

Bugatti

Bugatti, a brand better known for building supercars for the very rich, has now put its name on a bicycle that costs $23,599 and is limited to 250 units worldwide.

It’s called the Bugatti Factor ONE, a collaboration between the French supercar maker and Factor Bikes, and it is exactly the kind of two-wheeler you’d expect from a company that makes some of the most powerful and exclusive cars on the planet.

The bike was unveiled last month in Shanghai and is aimed, naturally, squarely at collectors and serious cyclists.

It’s not not just a regular high-end road bike with a fancy badge slapped on the frame, though. Factor says the Bugatti version goes beyond normal racing-bike rules, using a wider fork stance and a reworked front end designed to cut drag and improve stability at speed.

The company openly says the bike steps outside UCI regulations, which means this is less about showing up to your local sanctioned road race and more about building the two-wheeled equivalent of a hypercar.

The details are pure engineering marvels, as you’d expect. The bike gets a distinctive two-tone Bugatti-style split graphic, exposed 3K twill carbon to echo the weave seen on Bugatti cars, a “Dancing Elephant” emblem up front, custom Black Inc Bugatti Hyper 62 wheels weighing 1,298 grams per pair, Bugatti-branded Continental Grand Prix 5000 TT TR tires, a custom Selle Italia saddle trimmed in Alcantara, and a German-made SRM power meter with THM carbon crank arms.

Even the bike bag is bespoke. This bicycle wasn’t designed for someone pedaling to the farmers market in flip-flops.

The sticker shock is part of the point, though. Factor lists the Bugatti Factor ONE at $23,599, which is nearly three times the starting price of the standard Factor ONE and puts it in used-car territory. Of course, Bugatti customers are not generally the sort of people who blanch at a five-figure bicycle. They are buying the idea as much as the object - extreme performance, the finest of materials, and exclusivity, with a serial number attached.

One understands the appeal. Years ago, I drove a Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse, a machine so violently fast and so absurdly expensive, around $2.5 million at the time, that it seemed less like a car and more like 200 sticks of dynamite with leather seats.

That’s what Bugatti sells better than almost anybody - not just transportation, but theater, and their bicycle follows the same script. It is overbuilt, overthought, outrageously priced and almost certainly unnecessary.

Which, in Bugatti-speak, is exactly what makes it desirable.

“This project challenged us to rethink every assumption and push engineering boundaries in the same way Bugatti has done in the automotive world for over a century,” the company’s founder, Rob Gitelis, said in a statement.