Bugatti sends off its iconic W16 engine with a porcelain-clad Mistral

Bugatti has unveiled the ‘Blanc Éternel’, which is a W16 Mistral built to send off the mighty W16 engine in style.

This Mistral lands 15 years after Bugatti’s original porcelain-collaboration car, ‘L’Or Blanc’, did the same for the Veyron Grand Sport.

The Mistral itself is Bugatti’s final roadgoing statement for the W16 era, and this particular car wears its digital DNA on its sleeve. Unlike older Bugattis sculpted from clay, the Mistral was designed entirely on screen using NURBS surfacing, a network of precisely controlled digital patches that form its swooping bodywork.

For ‘Blanc Éternel’, that normally hidden patch layout becomes the exterior graphic itself: fine black lines trace the seams of the digital surfaces across pure white paintwork, exposing the geometric logic beneath the car’s curves.

It highlights the Mistral’s signature design elements — the reimagined horseshoe grille, the sculpted front end, the rising C-line, the aggressive air intakes and the X-shaped taillight graphic all get picked out by the black-on-white treatment, making the car look technically diagrammed rather than painted.

Every line was taped by hand onto the actual finished car, then counter-masked and sprayed section by section.

Porcelain details from KPM punctuate the design, appearing on the EB emblem, fuel and oil caps, and engine-cover inlays, while inside the cabin the same black-line graphic continues across white leather via a new paint process, with genuine porcelain used for the gear-shifter shells, kneepads, armrest inlay and window-lifter buttons.