A review of the $2.1 million Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport. This is a vehicle that generates over a thousand horsepower from an 8-liter, 16-cylinder engine, and uses it to get to 60 in under three seconds.

The author’s takeaway? It turns out not to be nearly as much fun as you’d expect:

The car comes with a great cocktail-party boast: if your Veyron, at rest, were passed by a $500,000 Mercedes McLaren SLR doing 100 m.p.h., you could floor the accelerator and still reach 200 m.p.h. before the Mercedes could match its speed.

That kind of physics-textbook problem is where my issues begin. At speeds where cars from a $40,000 Nissan 370Z to a $90,000 Porsche 911 become your wingmen, delivering pure blasts of driving joy, the Bugatti feels bored to death. The artillery-shell acceleration is diverting, but the Bugatti leaves you nowhere else to go, except directly to jail.

Yeah, you read that right. The official sports car of Heathen Central costs less than 5% of the Bugatti.

Many Bugatti buyers surely have access to racetracks, yet I’m equally sure that 90-some percent of them won’t have nearly enough driving talent to exercise this car. Mostly, I picture Euro-poseurs needing valet assistance to back up the Bugatti in Monaco, while jaws drop and the owner barks orders into his diamond-encrusted cellphone. When your car makes a Lamborghini seem tasteful, there’s a problem.

As with the New York Yankees or most Picasso paintings, I respect the Bugatti as an engineering exercise and a conglomeration of overpriced talent. Yet I might argue that any $2 million car should be powered by hydrogen, electricity — even nuclear fusion — not a gas engine blown up to overkill proportions. The Bugatti isn’t the future of the fast car; it’s the past writ in extra-large type.

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For half the Bugatti’s price, one could buy four genuine exotics that I find better looking and more rewarding: the Ferrari F430, Lamborghini Gallardo, Audi R8 V-10 and Aston Martin DBS. That would still leave $1 million for a 10-car garage filled with classics like a Jaguar E-Type and a Corvette Sting Ray fuelie.

Update from the comments: I thought my old climbing buddy Joe was making a joke when he said “If you want to pick one up cheap, someone parked one in Galveston bay,” but it turns out someone really did put a Veyron in the marsh this week. Whups!