New TG mag out now: £4m Bugatti Bolide exclusive drive!

In this brand-new issue of Top Gear magazine we drive a £4m track only Bugatti. Be honest, did you even flinch when you read £4m? It’s a preposterous amount of money – enough to buy 13 average UK houses or, more sensibly, 667,779 copies of your favourite car magazine – but our point is we’re being desensitised to the prices of rare and exclusive cars because they’ve long since detached from reality, and appear to be calculated based on a random phone number then adding four zeros.

First there was the McLaren F1 at £600k (£1.3m adjusted for today’s prices). Then came the Veyron that smashed through the £1m barrier and purveyors of fine automobiles haven’t looked back since.

There’s no longer an incentive to sell at a ‘sensible’ price, because then you might have to find tens of thousands of customers to make the numbers add up, which is quite a lot of hard work. Far better to find tens, or at most a few hundred collectors with unlimited funds who’ll have one of everything, and bang up the price until the balance sheet looks better.

Take the Alfa 33 Stradale, loosely based on a Maserati MC20 (full series production model, no limit on numbers, prices starting from £225k). You could argue the Alfa’s body is several notches more exotic and the interior looks quite a bit more special... but £1.7m more special? Limiting it to 33 units helps justify the price, but you get our point.

It’s even happening at the accessible end of the performance car spectrum, where the most recent versions of Toyota’s GR Yaris and Honda’s Civic Type R have both had import numbers slashed and prices whacked up. Then there’s the mother of them all, the new Renault 5 Turbo 3E – limited to 1,980 cars and yours for over £200k if you really lean into the customisation on offer.

A halo car’s purpose is to cast a warm glow on the whole company, and to do that they don’t need to be on every street corner, they just need to exist – on YouTube, in folklore and on the pages of magazines like the one you really should go and purchase right now. Here, click these words to grab a copy right away and have it delivered direct to your door.

Top Gear is both part of the problem, and part of the solution – we drive this unobtainium because 99.9 per cent of us can’t afford it, but we all need to dream, right?

Oh, and if you want even more from Top Gear magazine you can click these words to start a subscription, meaning you’ll get six issues for just £16.50. Bargain.