The car community is an interesting place where we champion things that we know won’t work out but still do because that is simply joyful. One such story is of a Bugatti Veyron, Water and an Insurance Scam followed by a harrowing search for the French hypercar. So let’s unravel one of the best stories to come out of the goldmine, which shows how multi-million dollar hypercars can also be saved from the doom of getting crushed.
The story starts with a person named Andy House who owned a Bugatti Veyron and had insured it for $2 million. Considering the car was worth somewhere in the region of $1 million, it may sound a little too optimistic to do so. However, Andy in his infinite wisdom, ended up crashing the Bugatti into Galveston Bay. The story Andy produced said that he did so because a pelican came in the way. Sadly, in the episodes with the people with the worst luck, a group of car enthusiasts filmed the Veyron going into the lake and in the video you could see about no existence of a pelican and the Veyron going into the lake with a monumental splash seemingly all by itself. Howse was later charged with Insurance Fraud and was sent to prison. In the owner’s absence, it was given to a Texas-based car. However, when the owner of the car got out of prison, he still had a clear title to the Bugatti. This is because no insurance was paid so no financing was required. So we have this hypercar which is flooded but with a clean title. This Exotic Car Dealer also decided upon himself to take a $980,000 loan which he would use to restore the car and this loan was also sanctioned as most of these banks don’t ever do the in-person inspection to see how functional a car is. Sadly, the exotic car dealer went out of business declared bankruptcy stopped making payments which is why the procedure for restoring this piece of French art had to wait.
The Bugatti was later repossessed by the bank and that’s when they found out how non-functional this Bugatti was. It’s important to note that the car was repainted white in the process when the dealer had money to do so. All of the repair bills were now with this mechanic but in twisted fates the bank ended up giving the title of the Bugatti back to the mechanic as he was threatening to mechanic lien the Bugatti and the bank had no option of valuating the French carcass or try liquidation for that matter.
This Veyron now is in the possession of the Texas exotic car dealer who decides to sell it to a Houston-based Physician who thinks maybe he could do it. Sadly, that never happened and the new owner decided to resell the using the Texas Exotic Car Dealer who enlisted the original owner Andy Howse who drove the car into Galveston Lake to broker the car which is when the Facebook ad of a $300k Bugatti surfaced in 2019.
Today the price of a Bugatti Veyron is $1 million give or take. But this is when VINwiki founder Ed Bolian and Freddy “Tavarish” Hernandez who was a pair of YouTubers conquering the American Automotive YouTube scene gave it a thought to buy it. And it may even have been bought by the pair with the help of some financing and would’ve catapulted Tavarish into immediate stardom as he was at the end of restoring the Gallardo and starting with the Fast and Furious Murcielago Project so we had a very good candidate to restore a car and he had the confidence to remake the wiring harness after working on quite a few VAG products as Bugatti made it clear they will not sell any parts for rebuilding of this project. Plus, it would’ve been a very hard task to rebuild an engine if the saltwater had caused the pistons to fail. However, despite all of that the Tavarish VINwiki duo would’ve failed anyway as their financial condition wasn’t good enough to effectively maintain as well as buy the Bugatti. VINwiki was a car story channel which was finding its groove and Tavarish was just getting introduced to peaks of 1 million views so it makes sense why this dream combination never happened.
The Bugatti was later sold seemingly to an unknown entity and left the garage for the first time since 2009 and the new owner also thought of rebuilding it but failed it. This new owner got in contact with Royalty Exotic Cars’ owner Houston Crosta. A little bit of mentioning needs to be done about Houston as he is probably the guy in this story for believably restores the flooded Bugatti. He is the main guy who deals with Bugattis with a network of rental supercars in Las Vegas, Nevada. He previously owned a Bugatti Veyron which was RWD swapped and to show how competitive Houston is, he did a $20k Bugatti Oil Change in a backyard and less than 3 hours which otherwise would’ve taken a confirmation from Molshiem, France and more than 2-3 months and also in less than $100! Mind you, this Bugatti Veyron which was owned by Houston was also a Mansory modified and tuned one which included removing extensive bodywork before doing it. If there was anyone to do the Flood Bugatti, Houston was the guy.
The story goes that Houston was also a shrewd negotiator who was told that the selling price would be $400k as the new owner said “I had $100k in this car and ideally would like on top of the selling price”. Crosta being a smart person asked what had been done as well as asked for a video showing whether the pistons and engine ran or not. The seller responded by saying that he had spent $100k for some external diagnosis and black paint. Houston responded with the fact that Black repaint added zero value to the proposition and the story went on for a few more months before the seller responded with a video showing pistons and engines working with a video. So $400k it was and Houston had bought the car. To date, he spent more than $250k on various repairs.
But you may remember me saying it was clear that Bugatti wouldn’t sell any parts for rebuilding so how did Houston get around to doing it? The fact is that used Bugatti parts are plentiful thanks to the fact that the likes of Mansory sell the old interiors and engine parts for a profit on top of the lavish mods they do. Now as Houston was a Bugatti dealer he also had the connections of other Bugatti owners and dealers who could source it and were able to source the wiring harness and the build was done.
Today you can glimpse the flooded Bugatti on the Royalty Exotic Cars YouTube Channel as well as a little bit of a cameo appearance on Car Trek on Tavarish’s YouTube channel. It is honestly such a good sight to see an unending saga of a French carcass get a second life like this. Houston has plans to modify this Bugatti with a new interior and power increases to add to the monstrosity of a Quad Turbo W16. Overall if you do the maths, it costs close to $700k to build this Bugatti and with flood damage in its history, it won’t be a profitable flip. However, a car with a colourful history vs. a car with a normal history that too a Bugatti. I don’t know about you but a lot of people would choose the first option and we can’t be happier with the fact that an icon like this Flooded Bugatti exists and has time to tell more of its stories and get to our hearts by being, in theory, The Cheapest Bugatti Veyron!
