A Multi-Million-Dollar Bugatti Sat Rotting For 25 Years Because The Accountants Couldn’t Be Bothered To Look

The Bugatti Everyone Forgot About Is Suddenly Worth Millions

A Bugatti that essentially disappeared during a corporate collapse and then sat untouched for a quarter century is about to find out what it’s worth. The 1994 Bugatti EB110 SS will cross the block at Mecum on May 16th, and the unofficial chatter puts it somewhere between $2 million and $3 million. Pinning down a number on a car this obscure is genuinely difficult, which is part of what makes the sale worth watching.

This isn’t a typical barn find with a vague backstory. This is a car that got lost inside its own company.

What the EB110 Actually Was

When the EB110 arrived in the early 1990s, it wasn’t just another exotic. It was considered the fastest production car in the world at the time, a serious statement from a revived Bugatti trying to plant its flag at the very top of the performance world. That alone gives every surviving example a place in the history books.

The numbers behind it are tiny. Only 139 units ever left the factory. Of those, just 30 were fitted with the optional SS package, which is the version going up for sale here. That package wasn’t cosmetic. It pushed the V12 up to 612 PS, which works out to 603 hp or 450 kW, and swapped most of the bodywork for lighter panels to chase even sharper acceleration. Fewer cars, more power, less weight. That’s the recipe collectors chase.

How It Got Lost

Here’s the part that turns this from a rare car into a real story. This particular EB110 was never meant to be sold at all. Bugatti built it to demonstrate the car to its parts vendors, essentially a working show piece for the people supplying the company.

Then 1995 happened. Bugatti went bankrupt again, and the whole operation fell into the messy business of selling off assets. According to the listing, the accountants handling those asset sales were apparently too busy to notice the coupe just sitting there. So it stayed put. Not in a museum, not in a private collection, but at an obscure Bugatti facility where nobody seemed to know why it was there or what it was for.

That detail is what makes this car different from the other 29 SS examples. It wasn’t preserved on purpose. It was abandoned by accident.

10 Weird but Genius Amazon Finds Every Car Guy Secretly Wants

Twenty-Five Years of Standing Still

The car sat motionless for 25 years. Neglected, with no clear purpose on record, slowly deteriorating the way any complex machine does when it’s left alone and never run. A hypercar of this complexity does not age gracefully in storage. Seals, fluids, electronics, and rubber all suffer when a car simply stands in place for decades, and this one’s technical condition worsened over time as a result.

That’s the cruel irony of it. One of only 30 SS cars, a piece of genuine Bugatti history, quietly falling apart because the paperwork lost track of it during a financial mess.

The Restoration That Changes the Math

A forgotten, deteriorating hypercar is one thing. A fully sorted one is another, and that’s where the value here comes from. The listing says the car has since been completely restored, and this part matters more than usual, with some help from the company’s original engineering team.

That’s not a detail to skim past. Restoration support from the people who actually engineered the car is about as legitimate as provenance gets on a vehicle this rare. It’s described now as close to stock, showing only 674 kilometers, which is 418 miles, and it carries a Bugatti Certificate of Authenticity. Low mileage, original engineering involvement, and factory documentation all stack up in the same direction.

Why Collectors Should Pay Attention

For the small world of buyers who can actually play at this level, this is a rare alignment. You have one of the fastest production cars of its era, one of just 30 SS variants, with a backstory no other example can claim, restored with input from the original team, and offered with proper paperwork. Cars like this don’t surface often, and when they do, the story tends to drive the price as much as the spec sheet.

The $2 million to $3 million range is only a guess, and given how unusual this car is, the real number could land anywhere. A piece this specific tends to attract the kind of buyer who isn’t shopping on logic alone.

The car spent 25 years as a ghost inside Bugatti’s own walls. On May 16th, it finally gets a price tag, and the market gets to decide what a forgotten legend is really worth.

Source
Images Via: Mecum

About the Author

Shawn Henry

Administrator

Shawn Henry has spent years writing about cars, and it shows—not in a resume kind of way, but in how he talks about them. He's the type who'll notice the weird trim option nobody remembers and actually know why it mattered. At Backfire News, he covers pretty much the whole spectrum: off-road trucks and trail builds, performance cars, racing, and the collector market. He's comfortable getting into the technical weeds, but he never forgets that most people read about cars because cars are fun, not because they want a spec sheet. His beat runs from classic and collector vehicles to overlanding culture, modified performance builds, new automotive tech, and the industry news that actually affects what ends up in your driveway. Mostly, though, Shawn thinks the best car stories are about people—the builds they pour money into, the road trips, the communities that form around a shared obsession. That's the stuff he likes writing about, and it's what you'll find in his work here.

View All Posts