Bugatti Tourbillon Ditches Speakers For A Piezoelectric Sound System

The crew from Top Gear recently got a behind-the-scenes look at Rimac’s shiny new Croatian headquarters, where Bugatti Rimac is hard at work on the upcoming Tourbillon. Mate Rimac himself walked them through some of the car’s coolest innovations. One of the wildest? The sound system. Instead of packing the car with heavy, traditional speakers, Rimac turned the entire carbon-fiber chassis into one giant speaker.

Here’s how it works. A normal speaker uses magnets and a moving voice coil to vibrate a diaphragm, usually a paper or metal cone, which creates sound by pushing air around. It’s effective but heavy. Rimac’s approach is different.

The Bugatti Tourbillon uses piezoelectric transducers, tiny devices that vibrate when electricity runs through them. These elements are fixed directly onto the carbon tub, so the whole structure resonates and produces sound. Rimac even showed Top Gear a “subwoofer”—a tiny piezo unit mounted to the roof. It’s lighter, smaller, and way more space-efficient than a standard woofer.

“Believe me, the sound quality of that car is in a different universe compared to a Chiron,” Rimac boasted. He also pointed out that this clever setup saves weight and space while also delivering better audio quality.

This isn’t the first time a car has used its body to help with sound. Mercedes tried something similar back in 2013 with the SL’s FrontBasssystem, which used the firewall as part of a speaker enclosure. But that still relied on traditional speakers. The Tourbillon is on another level, using the tub itself as the diaphragm.

Of course, the Bugatti Tourbillon also happens to pack a naturally aspirated V16 sitting right behind the seats. So the question is, will anyone really care about the hi-fi system when that monster engine is screaming away?