Bugatti's 2026 supercar is a £3.2m state-of-the-art sound system

When you're spending big money on a supercar you expect a suitably super sound system. Following on from the use of diamond membrane tweeters in the Chiron, Bugatti is taking an even more radical approach in its Tourbillon supercar. This isn't a car with a sound system. This is a car that is the sound system.

That's according to BBC Top Gear magazine (via motor1.com), which took a trip to the Bugatti-Rimac campus to meet CEO Mate Rimac. Rimac showed off multiple innovations that are being used in the Tourbillon and in the next generation Rimac Nevera sports car, and one such innovation is the use of piezoelectric diaphragms to turn the car's body into a speaker.

Why Bugatti is betting on piezoelectric power

Piezoelectric speakers are smarter than the magnet-driven speakers we're all familiar with. While both traditional and piezoelectric speakers vibrate to move air around and create sound waves, piezoelectric ones are much smaller because they don't use the same magnet and speaker cone design as traditional ones. Instead of big magnets they have small crystals, and those crystals vibrate to move a diaphragm and create audio.

In the Top Gear video, Mate Rimac demonstrates how the Tourbillon's diaphragm is the car itself. He shows off the subwoofer, which consists of a piezo element that's built into the roof of the car. It isn't big, but it's clever: its job is to vibrate the carbon fibre of the car.

According to Rimac, the system in the Tourbillon is "in a different universe compared to a Chiron. So we saved weight, space, and improved the sound quality."

Although there have been years of hype around piezolelectric speakers for in-car audio, as far as I'm aware this is the first time a car has been made with a piezoelectric sound system inside.

Mercedes was clearly thinking along similar lines to Bugatti just over a decade ago with the SL Roadster's FrontBass, an in-car audio system that used the car's own body as enclosures for the subwoofers located in the car's front footwells, but that was still built around traditional speaker tech.

Bugatti's approach is very different, and I wish I were in the right demographic to drive it. Sadly its price tag is around £3.2 million before tax, so I'll have to stick with the stereo in my Skoda.