Back in 2018, exotic car designer and builder Bugatti unveiled a provisional version of a custom one-off model called La Voiture Noire. The black car, commissioned by a client well-heeled enough to spend over $12 million on a passenger car designed especially for them by one of the preeminent manufactures in the business, has been completed. Bugatti rolled it out this week to much fanfare.

Bugatti’s website defines the W16-powered car as ‘haute couture’; indeed, it is a four-wheeled performance/luxury version of a singular Parisian fashion statement. The two-year period between the car’s initial unveiling in 2019 at Geneva, where it stole the annual show, and the appearance of the final delivery version was spent in finalizing the design and testing.

La Voiture Noire is both contemporary envelope-pusher and historical referent. As it is named after the missing ‘black car’ Bugatti Atlantic, one of only four to be built and the only one to vanish mysteriously during WWII, it also contains a bit of Bugatti mythos as a touch of brand enhancement.

Did Jean-Pierre Melville use it to escape the Nazis after a resistance mission, and later sell it to a secretive collector to fund his first film? Perhaps. To the reborn company, La Voiture Noire suggests the substantially restorative just as surely as the marque reboot itself; it powerfully associates the 21st-century company with the romance of its own past. It’s a marketing strategy that is familiar to anyone who follows the company and its brand development. Still, this example of it is remarkable. After all, what could be more romantic than redemptive discovery?

Interestingly, a wristwear homage to the singular vehicle showed up before the final version of the one-off. Jacob & Co. announced the Twin Turbo Furious Bugatti ‘La Montre Noire’ — which came with a million-dollar price tag — last autumn. Like a Bugatti, it runs fast, apparently.