Bugatti Wants You To Know The Chiron's A/C Is Strong Enough To Cool An Apartment
Bugatti loves to find creative ways of bragging about its products. Don’t forget, this is the company that once told us the Chiron’s coolant circuit has 800 litres of water pumped through it every minute. And now, the VW Group-owned brand would like us all to know that the Chiron and Divo’s air conditioning condensers are powerful enough to chill “an apartment in Europe”.
We’re talking about a decent-sized apartment, at that - one with an area of around 80 square metres, which is bigger than the average UK home. The reason the two Bugs need so much A/C clout is largely down to the long, heavily-raked windscreen, which has nearly double the surface area of a “conventional compact car”. Factor in the optional (and apparently very popular) Sky View glass roof, and you have the potential for a very toasty cabin.
The solution is those two big condensers, which work together with a 10kW compressor. The system - which has 9.5 metres of piping due to the mid-engine layout of the hypercar - can compress 3kg of coolant every minute.
The compressor sits close to the exhaust system, so this needs its own coolant system so it doesn’t get adversely affected by heat soak. Also, the high speeds that the Chiron and Divo can achieve needed to be factored in when the system was designed. Normally, air will enter a cabin just below the windscreen, but on Bugatti models, this will only happen if you’re going 155mph or faster.
“From this point onwards, there is a switch to negative pressure: a sophisticated control system with an additional ram air flap and an optimised blower ensures that air continues to enter the interior,” the company says. Crikey.
“At first glance, our air conditioning system appears to function like a conventional system,” Bugatti’s air-conditioning tech chief Julia Lemke (pictured above) says, adding, “But it’s a real challenge to perfectly harmonise the highly complex system of a small-series hyper sports car so that it works impeccably even at maximum speed and engine load.”
Making sure the system worked properly involved a lot of seat time in the Chiron, which sounds like an awfully good way of earning a living…
Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.
Comments
I wonder what Koenigsegg will do next to beat the apartment reference there…..chill an entire house down to sub zero?
They about to kill global warming
Park all the Chiron’s built so far next to eachother, open the doors and crank up the A/C on them. Solution to global warming, there you go.
Makes sense, run a quad-turbo W16 to solve global global warming! (I know you were jocking)