The Car That Disappeared Before Anyone Knew to Look for It

The EB110 has always been the answer to a question nobody asked loudly enough.

It arrived in 1991 from a Campogalliano factory that Romano Artioli built from scratch — white walls, clean lines, the whole fever dream of a man who believed Bugatti deserved resurrection on Italian soil. The Super Sport variant made 603 horsepower through a quad-turbocharged 3.5-liter V12. It was faster than the F40. It came first. History, as usual, was not paying attention.

Now Robb Report is covering a specific car — a 1995 SS that vanished sometime around its delivery year and resurfaced in 2019 with 413 miles on the clock. Mecum is offering it in May. The framing is resurrection. The tone is reverence.

They're not wrong. But the more interesting story is why the reverence had to wait this long.

The Car the Decade Forgot

The EB110 didn't fail on its merits. It failed on timing and circumstance — Bugatti Automobili SpA went bankrupt in 1995, the same year this particular car was built. The assets eventually landed with Volkswagen Group, who had their own plans for the name. The EB110 became an orphan. Not a legend. Not yet.

For years it occupied a strange middle ground — too exotic to be ignored, too associated with failure to be celebrated. The Veyron arrived in 2005 and rewrote the Bugatti story so completely that the EB110 became prehistory. A footnote with a great engine.

What's shifted is that the people who were teenagers when the EB110 existed are now the ones writing the checks. Taste has a 25-to-30-year lag. The car that looked like a dead end in 1995 looks like a lost artifact in 2025. That's not revisionism. That's just how it works.

413 Miles Is a Different Kind of Proof

There's something specific about a car with 413 miles that a restored example can't replicate. It's not just originality — it's the absence of narrative. No owner who put 40,000 miles on it and told the story at dinner parties. No track day that nicked the sill. No decade of Sunday drives that softened the seats into someone else's shape.

This car exists in a kind of suspended state. Whatever it was supposed to become, it didn't. That's either sad or remarkable depending on how you look at it, and I think it's both.

The auction estimate will be significant. The EB110 SS has been climbing — not Veyron money, not yet, but the trajectory is clear. A car this original, this low-mileage, at a moment when the collector market is actively rediscovering it? Mecum knows what they have.

What I keep thinking about is the 24 years. Whoever stored this car wasn't speculating on future values. You don't buy a Bugatti in 1995, watch the company collapse, and think: I'll just wait this out. More likely they bought something they loved and then life moved on and the car stayed where it was. That's a more human story than any auction catalog will tell you.

The EB110 deserved better from its own era. It's getting it now, which is something.

Better late than never has rarely looked this good.