First Drive: Bugatti Baby II Review

You run a car company that’s celebrating its 110^th anniversary – what do you do? You could create a series of special edition models perhaps, or commission an artist to design some low volume, exclusive celebratory artwork. Or you could, as Bugatti has done, and look back at your model history to find something a little different to recreate. Enter this, the Bugatti Baby II.

The original Bugatti Baby was built by company founder Ettore Bugatti and his son Jean for Ettore’s youngest son Roland. It was a battery-powered, half-scale recreation of the Bugatti Type 35, and when Bugatti customers saw this little car in the Bugatti headquarters they asked if they could have one too. And so the Bugatti Baby was born, with 500 built from 1927 to 1936.

The Bugatti Baby II follows a similar recipe. Working with Bugatti, the Little Car Company took the 1932 Lyon Grand Prix winning Type 35 and scanned it in its entirety before scaling it down. Exactly 500 will be built, like the original, but unlike the original the Baby II is being built at 75 per cent scale to allow adults as well youngsters to get behind the wheel.

There are three models, namely the Baby II, the Vitesse and the Pur Sang, with composite, carbon-fibre and hand-beaten aluminium bodies respectively, as well as some other important differentiators. The price? For starters €30,000, then €43,500 for the Vitesse and and €58,500 for the Pur Sang.

To see one in real life is strange. Old racing Bugattis aren’t huge anyway, but you feel like you’re standing too far away from the Baby II. Then you move closer. It is an exquisite little thing, and in every visible way it’s a Type 35 that has shrunk in the wash. The Bugatti badge, for example, is a real Bugatti badge as you’d find on a Chiron, made using 50g of solid silver, but like the car it is scaled down. Our car was a carbon-fibre bodied Vitesse, but go for the Pur Sang and you’ll get a body that takes 200 hours to make.

Then comes the moment you climb aboard to take the Baby II for a spin. Although it would have been hilarious for The Little Car Company to replicate the Type 35’s original supercharged 2.3-litre straight-eight engine at 75 per cent scale, battery power was in keeping with the original. The base Baby II has a 1.4kWh battery pack and two drive modes, namely Novice and Expert. The Vitesse and the Pur Sang, however, both get a 2.8kWh battery, and as well as the Novice and Expert drive modes they get a speed key. Anyone familiar with the Bugatti Veyron or Chiron will know that you need the speed key to unleash the car’s top speed, and so it is the same with the Baby II. In Novice you get 1.0kW of power and a limited top speed of 12mph, in Expert you have 4kW of power and a 30mph top speed, but insert and turn the speed key and you’ll be treated to 10kW and a top speed of 42mph. Crikey. More than 10 per cent of the Chiron speed for less than five per cent of the price. Man maths tells me that’s good value.

There’s an ignition key, modelled on the key of the Pagani Zonda, and what was the fuel pump on the Type 35 is now the drive selector, with three indicators on the left-hand-side of the dash for drive, neutral and reverse. With the power on, the speed key inserted and drive engaged you set off. If I’m honest I expected to be underwhelmed, for the Baby II to feel like a toy, as surely that’s all it’s good for. But it doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels like an actual car.

First of all, it feels nippy. Ten kilowatts of electric power is plenty when you’re sitting a few inches off the ground, as is 42mph when you haven’t got a windscreen, helmet or any form of eyewear.

The adjustable rotary dampers were tuned by Bugatti test driver and two-time Le Mans-winner Andy Wallace, as were the brakes and the power delivery. As a result the suspension – leaf springs, like the original – is firm but compliant and communicative. The unassisted steering, too, is as chatty as you’d imagine, with the added bonus of being able to see the Michelin tyres flex and the wheels wriggle around as you go over bumps or through surface changes while feeling it all through the wheel. With understeer you can both feel and see it, and adjust everything accordingly, and accelerate out of a corner with your foot mashed into the accelerator and you’ll get some nice, 75 per cent scale oversteer.

The drum brakes are hydraulically rather than cable operated, as they were said to be a little problematic (or rather sketchy) in testing. They work well, too, although without ABS you can lock the wheels if you really bury your foot into the pedal as hard as you possibly can. That said you can drive the car with one pedal, as lifting off the accelerator recharges the battery and slows you down. The Baby II has a range of around 50km on a single charge, and it’s a two-minute job to swap the old battery out for a new unit.

There isn’t much to say here, at least compared to modern car interiors. Unlike the Chiron you don’t get air conditioning or even sat-nav. What you do get, however, is a machined aluminium dashboard identical to that of the Veyron, where the pattern is, like everything else, at 75 per cent scale. The needles and fonts of the dials are the same as the Type 35’s, too, and if a dial was surplus to requirements then The Little Car Company found something else to do with it, like the petrol gauge which takes up the role of the battery gauge.

When it comes to additional features, well, it’s more of the same. Everything is well finished and accurate, and you simply don’t get bored of the details. The pedals are scale Chiron pedals, for example, and the redundant billet aluminium fuel cap is now the charging cap. The pedal box moves forwards and backwards too, which is good news as, despite the fact this is a scale car it’s actually quite roomy, and with the pedals as far away as they could go, well, I couldn’t reach them…

As a way to celebrate a 110-year anniversary, I can’t think of anything else that would have been as entertaining as building another Bugatti Baby. Sure, you could buy a real car for the price of the Baby II, but isn’t this so much more fun than seeing a one-off, £10m special edition Chiron with fancy paint or extra power? Isn’t this something different to a hideously expensive piece of artwork that’ll be talked about once and then never seen or heard about again? What’s more, it doesn’t drive like a toy or feel like a total novelty. The only shame is it isn’t road legal, although I’m told that isn’t technically out of the question…