Two Piëch hypercars to debut at Geneva show

It has been all Porsche for decades, but now the other side of the Zell am See’s most famous family will hit the Geneva motor show next month with two high-powered sports cars.

The first will be a one-off Bugatti, a US$18 million version of the Chiron Sport for ex-Volkswagen Group boss Dr Ferdinand Piëch, for the Bugatti stand.

The second will be the Mark Zero, an all-electric, multi-motor supercar built in Switzerland by Piëch, a new Swiss sportscar maker fronted by one of Dr Piech’s sons.

While the Bugatti version isn’t guaranteed to carry the Piëch name, there’s no doubt who the 8.0-litre, W16 quad-turbo battle axe is for, having been commissioned by the Godfather of the German car industry himself.

But, with the asking price for a stock Chiron somewhere around the US$1.5 million mark, that leaves at least US$16 million in customization from a very private man with one of the biggest private car collections in Europe.

And, as an aside, this is the sort of thing the Volkswagen Group companies used to do for him under orders.

It will also have the Ans Bugatti special edition (limited to 20 models) of the Chiron Sport, marking the 110th year of Bugatti’s admittedly start-stop existence.

Meanwhile, in a different hall in Geneva, far removed from the Volkswagen Group’s commanding position, will be Piëch Automotive AG.

Anton Piëch is one co-CEO of Piëch Automotive AG, which was founded in 2017. The other co-CEO is industrial designer Rea Stark Rajcic and there’s already a complex web of Piëch corporate offshoots, including intellectual property, design, engineering, laboratory and holding companies.

Its first car, the Mark Zero, leaked already with teaser images trickling out of a long-nose, short-tail grand tourer body style.

Piëch Automotive claims it will have a range of more than 500km and will weigh just 1800kg, riding on a modular EV architecture that can be scaled up or down in size for subsequent models.

While Piëch Automotive is so far quiet on which battery and electric motor tech it will use for the Mark Zero, it has admitted to developing a new energy recovery system.

Its battery pack will be, unusually, air cooled (well, it’s the Porsche family, after all...), with the heavy batteries sitting on top of the rear axle and stacked inside the transmission tunnel, rather than the increasingly popular “skateboard” approach.

Piëch Automotive also claims the modular architecture could even allow it to fit an internal combustion engine to turn future models into hybrids, which would be a first. Most plug-in hybrids are internal-combustion cars first, with electric motors added in, and Piëch Automotive is proposing to do it the other way around.

It’s even hinting at a fuel-cell version in the future and has promised to make its modular architecture available to other low- and high-volume manufacturers.

Its build quality should be better than expected from a low-volume outfit because it bought Aston Martin’s tooling and will combine it with German production-line processes.

It has already designed a range to sit on the modular architecture, including the two-seat Mark Zero, a four-door sedan and a fast SUV, though dates are not confirmed.

But even more intriguing than the Mark Zero is the window the operation opens into the notoriously private world of the Piëch family.

Dr Ferdinand Piëch, 81, is one of the grandchildren of legendary engineer Ferdinand Porsche.

He was bound for an automotive life, with his university mechanical engineering thesis being a paper on an eight-cylinder Formula One engine, which was a success despite his dyslexia.

He personally engineered the legendary Porsche 917k, which dominated the Le Mans 24 Hour race until the French changed the rules to outlaw it, but withdrew to Audi after a 1972 agreement to keep the family out of Porsche’s day-to-day management.

He spent a decade as the Volkswagen Group’s CEO (the Phaeton, the Veyron and the Golf IV were his signature models) and another one as the group’s Advisory Board chairman. He staved off bankruptcy for Volkswagen, fought off a leveraged takeover by his own family company, Porsche, and bought the Lamborghini and Bentley brands.

Anton Piëch, meanwhile, is the seventh of Dr Piëch’s 12 children. Anton is the second child of Dr Piëch’s second marriage (to Marlene Maurer).

Dr Piëch had five children with his first wife, two more with his second, two more with his third and three with his current wife, Ursula Plasser. His eldest child, Arianne, turns 60 this year while his youngest, Gregor Anton, is 25.