Welcome to an especially outrageous Bugatti Divo, with paintwork so complex, the company nearly gave up trying to realize its customer’s request because it was simply too hard to get right.
Yup—the collector who ordered this Divo asked Bugatti to come up with a “geometric-dynamic algorithmic fading pattern” to make his car stand out from the 39 others in the limited run. The company obliged, and after a fraught development process lasting around two years, was able to deliver the ‘Lady Bug’ to its lucky owner in the USA.
The tricky bit was precisely applying all the diamond stencils to the bodywork. Bugatti says that “owing to the three-dimensional, sculptural form of the Divo with its contours, curves, and ribs, the 2D-printed diamonds became distorted,” and that it took weeks for designers “to match the CAD data with reality and pull the film over the deeply concave surface without the diamonds becoming distorted or developing folds.”
Bugatti tested this process twice on other Divos, because there would only be one chance to get it right on the customer’s actual car. Once the film had been successfully applied, the company took several days to check the positioning of each and every one of the circa 1,600 diamond shapes before sending the car to paint.
Painting the Lady Bug took another couple of weeks, then the diamonds could be peeled away to reveal the finished pattern.
A Bugatti Divo costs well over £4 million (P269 million) before options. You can click right here to read our review. We shudder to think how much this particular chap paid for nigh on two years’ worth of design work.
Check out the detailed work that went into the "Lady Bug" Bugatti Divo:
NOTE: This article first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
