Brown Pelican bests Bugatti Veyron!

There’s a great chance that no one reading this owns a Bugatti Veyron. This French-built mega-car is the automobile world’s greatest super power. You’ll pay dearly for one – about $1.6 million a copy – but ownership puts the motoring sophisticado into a very exclusive fraternity. Only 200 or so units prowl the highways.

Bugatti Veyron. Menacing, eh? The 16 cylinder power plant produces a claimed 1001 horsepower, which rockets the car to 60 mph in an astonishing 2.7 seconds. Your sedan is going to be considered quite sporty if it hits 60 in 7 seconds. In the Bugatti, the passage of 7 seconds sees the speedometer pegging 125 mph. Keep your foot in it – assuming you slotted in the secret key that lowers the body and shuts diffuser flaps – and this beast will reach 253 mph.

Here’s a neat bragging facto for Bug owners: If a half-million dollar Mercedes McLaren SLR toasted by you at 100 mph while you sat dormant in your Veyron, you could punch it, shortly overtake the Merc and still beat the Mc-L to 200 mph.

Excessive? Quite. Environmentally friendly? Not by a longshot. Ironically, Bugatti is owned by Volkswagon, which also handles design work on the mega-car. This is the same VW that produces my car, the Jetta TDI, which is top shelf in regards to fuel economy. For the price of the Bugatti, assuming you negotiated a fair deal and didn’t pony up the extra dinero for the topless version, you could buy eighty (80) Jetta TDI’s. And the little VW will go a long ways towards keeping the sheiks at bay, as it can get nearly 50 mpg on the freeway. The Bugatti manages as little as 2 mpg at full whirl. We’ll be fair, though, and give the Bug an average consumption of 5 mpg.

Thus, the Veyron would suck down 200 gallons of top-grade fuel to traverse 1,000 miles, while the (much) lesser VW TDI might only sip 23 gallons or so to cover the same stretch. It’s enough to make environmentalists retch!

Enter the Brown Pelican, Pelecanus occidentalis. An unlikely combatant in a match with a Bugatti Veyron. And the odds would be on the car, but anyone betting the underdog would be a big winner in this case.

Here’s the story. An obviously well-heeled real estate man was trolling the Gulf shore of Galveston, Texas yesterday in his Veyron, scoping out undeveloped parcels of beachfront property. I was just there in April, and if you’ve been to this area, you know it is dynamite bird habitat – that which hasn’t already been built upon.

So, the guy is living large, cruising along while yammering into his cell, when suddenly, INCOMING! A monstrous 8 pound sac-bill with a 7-foot wingspan roared right across the road, nearly beaning the Bugatti. Our hero was so startled he dropped his phone, and in the ensuing chaos lost control of the supercar, which then veered into the quagmire of a roadside saltwater lagoon. Presto! He’s now invented the world’s most luxurious hydro-auto. Reports have it that the car continued to run for fifteen minutes while half-submerged in the briny stew. I shudder to speculate what this repair bill might be.

Triple A hooks the Bugatti to tug it from the mire. How embarrassing. Poor guy. Wanna see a vid of the thing being sucked from the ooze, CLICK HERE. And to think, a pelican!!! caused this! Now, if the story is true, and P. occidentalis truly did put this car in the drink, it may have been part of a conspiracy.

Pelicans look dumb, and act dumb, but they aren’t dumb. This proves it. When the bird saw this guy, and realized the value of the car he was wheeling about, coupled with the fact that he was closely inspecting real estate while barking orders into his phone, Senor Pelican knew something bad for birds was afoot.

This could only mean more imperiled ocean-front bird habitat was going to bite the dust, and sooner than later. Time for action. So, our bird swooped in, knocked the offending Veyron and its land-gobbling occupant into the drink, and with luck staved off more condos and other rubble.

Pelican = 1. Bugatti = 0.