Road Blocks

Want to build your own supercar? Here’s how Lego built a drivable, life-size Bugatti Chiron replica from a million pieces of plastic.

- Matt Bolton

When Lego announced that its next deluxe Technic model would be a Bugatti, the company invited us to visit the car maker’s test track in Germany. Not to see the small model, but something more mind-blowing: Lego has built, from over a million pieces of Technic, a life-size Lego Bugatti Chiron… That actually drives.

Weighing around 1,500kg, the car is built pretty much solely from Technic pieces, with the exception of a steel frame (necessary for supporting all that weight), wheels (necessary for being round in a way that Lego is not), hydraulic brakes, power steering, a roll cage (just in case), and a few other mechanical pieces that really can’t be made of plastic.

It’s the first Lego creation of this kind of scale to be built without using glue to hold the pieces together, and that also means it’s the first time Lego had to build load-bearing sections purely from Technic. Even more impressive is that the car was so complex, the computer modelling systems the team normally uses couldn’t handle all of the design, so most of it was planned by hand.

“The first beams were built on a table, and we were testing the properties of them and what they could withstand,” explained Pavel Volný, an engineer on the project.

We were curious about how the team kept track of how it was going to look and fit together at the final stages with no fully planned model to refer to. “We almost lived together for like a quarter of a year,” said Pavel. “We were discussing things ad hoc, on the spot. We had to be sure that each and every member of the team had the right information at the right time.”