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.