Trees. Sun. Bridge. House. Guardrail. The Sicilian piedmont blurs in one long incomprehensible gout of liquid reality...treesunbridgehouseguardrail... The Bugatti Veyron bellows at 205 mph down the island's main autostrada. A deep aortic throb registers between my shoulder blades. I haven't blinked for, like, 10 minutes — I'm Keir Dullea in 2001. The truth is, I've driven this fast before, but never in a street car, never on a public road, and absolutely never on a cracked, sun-buckled hunk of weaving motorway like this. If I crash, the Sicilian highway department can expect a very strongly worded letter from me.

In the passenger seat, the Veyron's chief engineer, Dr. Wolfgang Schreiber, natters on about the supernumerary challenges involved in building this $1.7 million supercar, officially the fastest production automobile in the world: the 12 radiators, the 16 cylinders, the four turbos, the 1,000-plus horsepower, the seven-speed double-clutch transmission, the endless calculations and aerodynamic refinements that keep this beautiful, wind-glossed capsule from flitting off the road in a fit of turbulence. I mention that it is quite amazing that two people can even converse in a car that's blitzing the atmosphere at 200-plus mph, kind of like having cocktails in the middle of a cyclone. "We worked very hard on cabin noise," says Herr Schreiber, plainly glad I've noticed. Then, looking at the pockmarked road ahead, he says, "Here, now is the time for maximum speed."

I glance at the alloy-bezel blackface gauge indicating reserve horsepower. I have another 500 hp available, approximately one whole Dodge Viper. This hardly seems possible. Tightening my grip on the hand-stitched leather wheel, I roll on the throttle. Then the car does an unexpected and celestial thing. It downshifts. At over 200 mph, it downshifts from seventh to sixth gear, and as it does an eerie force is summoned from mysterious precincts within the enormous eight-liter engine. My breastbone gets heavy against my lungs. The landscape carousels a twitch quicker. Two-ten, 215 mph. Oh, yes, this car is fast.

As a peddler of automotive bombast at the Los Angeles Times, I always welcome the chance to enthuse and hyperbolize about a powerful sports car — It is to normal cars what a horny Viking raiding party is to Oprah's Book Club! — that sort of thing. But in the case of the Bugatti Veyron, words fail me. So let's look at some of the car's signature numbers: zero to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds; zero to 253 mph in a mind-bending 53 seconds; and in a panic braking maneuver, 253 mph to zero in 10 seconds. Imagine a Japanese bullet train pulling into the station at top speed. "My philosophy is that you should be able to brake better than you can accelerate," Schreiber says.

Beats the hell out of existentialism.

Flash. It's two years later, November 2007. There's unease in Molsheim, a dully fastidious village about 20 minutes from Strasbourg, in the Alsace region of France, and the ancestral home of the Bugatti company. Even in a world awash with petrodollars and hedge fund billionaires, the Veyron has found only about 180 buyers for the projected 300 to be built. The Veyron project — named for Bugatti's Le Mans–winning driver, Pierre Veyron — is estimated to have emptied more than half a billion euros from the coffers of VW Group, which resurrected the storied French marque a decade ago. And for what? As Ettore Bugatti himself found out in the 1930s with his Royale project — a stupendous ultra-luxury locomotive — these kinds of cost-is-no-object performance pieces almost never make any money. (See Porsche Carrera GT, Mercedes-Benz's SLR McLaren or Maybach, et al.)

And now, again, the resurrected Bugatti name hangs in the balance. This year, Porsche is set to take a controlling interest in VW Group, which is like the Ottoman Empire of car building — its holdings include Volkswagen (the brand), Audi, Škoda (don't ask), Bentley, and Lamborghini. Porsche's acquisition means it will also own the profitless Bugatti. To thin its supercar portfolio, Porsche AG may sell the company or shutter it altogether. That's what sensible executives would do.

"I don't think it will happen," says Dr. Franz-Josef Paefgen, president of Bugatti, at the L.A. Auto Show. "The investment has been made. We are selling cars. We have a second car in the works."

The second, post-Veyron Bugatti of the VW era is assumed to be a four-seat, front-engine mega-luxury saloon, using the same 8.0-liter W16 engine as the Veyron, perhaps built on the same chassis as the next-generation Bentley Arnage. But considering the troubled birth of the Veyron and the technical demands of a car worthy to wear the Bugatti badge, the slow sales and the internecine brand conflict, it may all yet end in tears.

Not encouragingly, Molsheim is resorting to some lowly car-selling tricks to move the sheet metal. Namely, special-edition Veyrons (see the Dale Earnhardt–edition Chevy Monte Carlo). The Pur Sang, for example, is essentially an unpainted Veyron. This limited edition of just five cars — about $2 million apiece — leaves the stygian carbon weave and shimmering aluminum of the body panels beautifully exposed. Want something a little dressier? At the recent Geneva Auto Show, the company unveiled the Veyron Fbg par Hermès, a collaboration with the famed saddler featuring matching calfskin upholstery and wallet as well as Hermès badging on the wheels and exterior. That will be $2.3 million, please. (Undercoating is extra.)

Meanwhile, the Veyron's marquee billing as the fastest car in the world is being challenged, and from a most unlikely quarter. Shelby SSC in West Richland, Washington — a veritable fruit stand compared to the VW Group — claims to have built the fastest production car in the world, the 1,183-horsepower Ultimate Aero. Last October, with officials from Guinness World Records looking on, Shelby SSC's test driver — 71-year-old Chuck Bigelow — made two passes up and down a two-lane road in rural Washington, at an average speed of 256.18 mph.

"We look forward to defending our title as the fastest car in the world," says Dr. Paefgen, with the air of someone who's just been asked to wrestle with a hobo. "We know what it took to build the Veyron, and I don't think anyone can match it."

Julius Kruta, the Bugatti company historian, picks me up from the Grand Hôtel Strasbourg. We're going to the National Auto Museum of France, in nearby Mulhouse. Kruta is owlish and a touch déshabillé, more IT guy than legend-keeper, but he's arguably the company's most important employee, its in-house Thucydides. Kruta was the first employee to be posted in the restored Château St. Jean in 2001, which served as Bugatti's salon for wining and dining prospective buyers starting in 1928. And, Kruta speculates, if the company should ever have to wind down, he'll be the one to turn off the lights.

In his lovely British-inflected English, and with the ease of a man sure of his facts, Kruta proceeds to relate the history of the company — while keeping his VW Golf's accelerator pegged to the floor.

There is a stone monument a few miles outside Molsheim marking the place and date — August 11, 1939 — where Jean Bugatti, 30-year-old son of founder Ettore Bugatti, swerved to miss a drunk bicyclist and crashed through the gates of the pearly hereafter. According to legend, the bicyclist was the local postal deliveryman, who became so despondent over the incident he later killed himself. Mail delivery in the area afterward was much improved.

At that moment, the 29-year-old Bugatti company ceased to exist in any plausible sense. Ettore had some time earlier abandoned Jean to the business's dwindling finances while he went off to hold court in some of the better brothels of Paris. "Jean was a much finer artist than his father," Kruta says as we pass by. "He died too young." Eight years later, Ettore died with plans for new cars on his drawing board. In the fifties, his younger son, Roland, made a game attempt to revive the company, building a race car and entering the 1956 French Grand Prix, but the car retired after 17 laps.

With that, the House of Bugatti — responsible for many of the most successful race cars in prewar Europe, creators of art-moderne triumphs like the Type 57SC Atlantic — was swept into history's glamorous dustbin of très luxe French car companies: Delage, Delahaye, Talbot-Lago, Avions Voisin. Adieu, adieu.

Ettore came from a family of well-known and eccentric Milanese artists. His younger brother, Rembrandt, a sculptor, committed suicide — the elephant that adorns the radiator cap of the Type 41 Royale was his creation. (His works now sell for millions.) Self-taught and stubbornly anti-mathematical in a field and time that required huge sums of pencil work, Ettore relied on an uncanny intuition about machinery. If you accept the common wisdom that Ettore, like his brother, was more artist than engineer, he was more Brancusi than Henry Moore. The company's cars were noted for their lightness, their fineness, and these qualities served them well in grand prix competition. Bugatti cars — particularly the Type 35 — dominated racing in the twenties and thirties, the glamorous apogee of motoring.

But it was Jean Bugatti, the long-suffering son, who created the marque's most beautiful cars, including the Type 41 Royale and Type 57SC Atlantic. The Atlantic is regarded as the summary achievement of prewar coach building. Only two of the three scroll-fendered Type 57SC Atlantics survive, one owned by Ralph Lauren and the other by collector Peter D. Williamson. The Type 41 Royale, of course, is famous for being the most expensive car ever sold at auction: In 1987, a Swedish collector bought one for $18 million.

The greatest victory in Bugatti history came in 1939, when the factory's underfunded single-car team, with Jean-Pierre Wimille and Pierre Veyron at the wheel, defeated the pride of European racing, including Delage, Lagonda, and BMW. The winning Type 57C "Tank" was the same car that Jean was driving when he was killed. (Ettore had forbidden Jean from racing.)

"It's very sad," says Kruta, as we walk through the museum. "Jean was the responsible son, and his father was very cool to him, very domineering. We have many letters between them and it's all very businesslike, hardly any affection expressed between them. Never, 'I love you.'"

Whether it was the cars, the racing glory, or the family intrigues, the name Bugatti came to have a special hold on the automotive world after World War II. It was, after all, the dominant team in grand prix racing at its most deadly and romantic. The cars managed to synthesize Art and the Machine, as foretold in innumerable futurist manifestos. Bugattis were also quite rare. In three decades, the factory built fewer than 8,000 cars, and many of the most desirable were destroyed during the war. Every now and then collectors would claim to have found this car or that, fata morganas of car collecting. It all gave the Bugatti name the same kind of cachet that Stradivarius has for music lovers.

In fact, VW's resurrection of Bugatti followed another. In 1988, the entrepreneur Romano Artioli rebuilt the company from scratch, constructing a state-of-the-art factory in Campogalliano, Italy, to produce a stunning supercar called the EB110. Less than a decade later, in 1995, having produced just 140 cars, Artioli's company went bankrupt.

VW's 1998 purchase of Bugatti was engineered by then chairman Ferdinand Piëch, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche and every bit the eater of scenery that Ettore Bugatti was. Piëch's dream was to put the world's finest car brands under one roof. That same year, he arranged to take control of Lamborghini and Bentley, two other faded beauties of European performance and style. None of this seemed unusual at the time. In the nineties, Ford bought Jaguar, Aston Martin, and Land Rover, while BMW bought Rolls-Royce.

The rap on Piëch was that he overreached. He promised that the new Bugatti would be the fastest, most powerful, most expensive car ever made. It was Piëch who set the well-rounded parameters for the Veyron: 1,000 hp and faster than 400 kilometers per hour (248 mph). Such a car would eclipse the McLaren F1's long-standing and seemingly unassailable production-car speed record of 240.1 mph.

"Piëch was maniacal," industry analyst Peter DeLorenzo told the Los Angeles Times. "He was one of the great engineering geniuses of the late-20th century, but he proved that brilliance on the engineering side doesn't necessarily transfer to managerial vision."

And yet, to the extent that the Veyron is an extravagantly wasteful triumph, it's not Piëch's alone. Bernd Pischetsrieder, who replaced Piëch in 2002, had a chance to pull the plug on the Veyron project, which at the time was in a state of chaos: The development cars were too heavy and there were problems with the engine, the fuel pumps, the cooling. Most of all, there were the irreconcilable aerodynamic demands of a car that had to have high downforce for proper handling, but low downforce (less aero drag) for top speed. One car suffered an embarrassing mishap in one of its early public previews.

Pischetsrieder doubled down. He dismissed the project's chief engineer and brought in wunderkind Schreiber, who perfected the car's novel speed-adaptive aerodynamics: At low speed, the rear wing is retracted. At 137 mph, the dual-plane rear wing deploys on aircraft-grade hydraulic struts and the body lowers to about a 3.5-inch ride height. In order to achieve top speed, drivers use a special second key to set the aero surfaces to a minimum angle of attack, while the body lowers to a ground-skimming 2.5 inches.

All brilliant, and all costly. The extensive reworking of the Veyron took two years longer, and many more millions of euros, than expected.

Again, a reasonable question is, why? If Piëch's intention was to highlight VW's engineering genius, why not slap a VW badge on the nose and be done with it? Why resurrect this maledicted brand?

"Our average customer already has about 30 cars," the historian Kruta says. "The last thing they need is another car. These people are interested in human beings. They only become interested in a car if there is a personal touch, a story to be told." And no auto company has ever had a better backstory than Bugatti.

What's interesting about VW Group's reconstitution of Bugatti is the degree to which it has committed to the theater of it all. Visitors to the company headquarters in Dorlisheim will find Bugatti's old sales and administration office and the 19th-century manor house, the Château St. Jean, restored to its former grandeur, right down to the wrought-iron railings emblazoned with the initials "EB." After VW's purchase, the stables and workshops on the grounds were digitally mapped, torn down, and then rebuilt. Bugatti's orangerie, where Ettore kept his cold-sensitive plants, has been maintained in a lovely state of disrepair — overgrown and empty-windowed — to give the grounds a kind of out-of-history continuity. This is the car-building equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg.

Kruta points out the low stone wall and cobblestone road dividing the original grounds from the atelier, the ultramodern assembly plant where the Veyrons are knocked together. "The idea was to keep this area as it was in Ettore and Jean's time," says Kruta, "separate from the modern part of Bugatti."

The atelier is a single-story ellipse (like the Bugatti badge) slung low over some green acreage near the main highway. Designed by the German architect Günther Henn, the building has a floor-to-ceiling glass façade, giving workers a nice view of the Vosges Mountains. With its natural light, gray floor, and hushed and unhurried ambience, the atelier seems more like a materials-testing lab at Stanford than a car company. Missing are the sounds and smells of ordinary car-building, the shrill muezzin of air guns, the hammer clanging, the bitter white sparks of welding. When Kruta and I walk through, there are about 12 cars on the floor or suspended on racks, in various states of assembly. And that's what it is: assembly. Nearly every part of the Veyron — including the monstrous aluminum-and-magnesium quad-turbo engine — is manufactured somewhere else, mostly in Germany. The body panels are formed and pre-painted, the seats and wheels pre-skinned, the electronics pre-wired. Still, these are probably the most complicated cars ever made, and that's reflected in the work rate — two cars per week.

At each of the eight workstations are stacks of parts, the most humble of which represents a miserable slice of some poor development engineer's life. Example: The square-head bolts (with the EB emblem) that hold the Veyron's prodigious air plenums are made of a specially concocted matrix of titanium, each worth about $100. (I have a souvenir.)

At the back of the factory are two blazing tunnels of light: the final inspection stations, where the cars are bathed in an all-revealing faux sunlight to discover the smallest surface imperfection.

Prospective buyers will be taken on a factory tour and then conducted to the salon, across from the orangerie, to pick out the body colors and hides and other kinds of personalization. The Veyron is a highly specified machine, but if purchasers want something unusual — a particular kind of stereo system, or zebra upholstery — it can be arranged.

Typically, the cars are shipped to buyers by plane, with a technician as escort, to help owner-car consummation. But the factory has had a few owner driveaways, too. This seems like an awfully fun way to spend more than a million dollars.

With all the theatrics, you might convince yourself you are on holy ground. Not quite. Bugatti's original factory is about a mile way, in Molsheim proper, still occupied by the French aerospace concern that long ago absorbed the remainder of Bugatti's postwar aircraft effort. There, too, is Ettore Bugatti's house (many visitors are under the impression he lived in the Château St. Jean). Its owners refused to relinquish the property to VW.

Of course, you wouldn't want a Ferrari built anywhere but Maranello, or a Lamborghini from anyplace but Sant'Agata. One pays for provenance. But VW's myth-making is a fearfully expensive thing. It would be much simpler, and vastly cheaper, to build the car in Wolfsburg rather than in this small, out-of-the-way operation in eastern France. But in the end, the only thing that inoculates Bugatti from the charge of being a commodity, of being the world's most extravagant toaster, is illusion.

Soon my hosts send around a Veyron — this one an outrageous black-and-red number. It's been raining and sleeting and, as Kruta notes, Michelin doesn't make 14-inch-wide snow tires. As I ease the car off the grounds and onto the motorway, I'm mindful of the thousand or so horses cantering behind me. A fun fact is that, at top speed, the car will run out of fuel in 12 minutes. It's a safety precaution: The tires would melt after 15 minutes.

There's no denying — at 60 mph or 250 mph — this is an astonishing car. The stunning solidity of the thing, the deep and inherent quiet, the lightness with which it moves its two tons through space. Everything is exceptional: the machine-turned center console, the navigation readouts hidden in the rearview mirror, even the ferocious slap of the car's mighty wipers, designed to work at triple-digit speed.

This is a time for lovers of fine automobiles to be alert. An age is passing. Fifty years from now, the Bugatti Veyron will seem like the final erotic death roll of a doomed technology. It occurs to me that we will not recognize the moment when we drive the finest automobile in all history — it's something we can only realize in retrospect.

And yet, I've got a feeling.