Bugatti Chiron's fuel economy officially rate

The Bugatti Chiron.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released its official fuel-economy ratings for Bugatti's new Chiron, and although the eye-watering fuel-efficiency ratings likely won't put prospective buyers off the Chiron due to how much it costs to run, it could make some think twice when they consider how often they're going to have to stop to refuel this beast.

To be fair, if you're going to buy a car with a quad-turbo, 8.0-litre 16-cylinder engine, developing an astonishing 1,500 horsepower and 1,180 lb.-ft. of torque, you'll expect to be refueling on a fairly regular basis.

Even so, the figures of 9 mpg in the city, 14 mpg on the highway and 11 mpg combined are pretty shocking, especially when you know the real-world numbers are likely to be considerably worse than that.

Although improving fuel economy probably isn't top of the agenda for Bugatti's designers and engineers, some credit has to be given for their achievements in this area, as the Veyron only managed 10 mpg combined, and the Chiron represents a performance upgrade of 25 per cent on the Veyron.

To achieve all this, almost every single component of the engine has been examined and developed, and the Chiron is said to have a top speed of 261 mph and can get you from a standing start to 60 mph in a staggering 2.3 seconds.

Of course, not too many buyers are likely to use the Chiron as their daily driver, so ridiculously frequent visits to the fuel station are unlikely to hurt sales. That's partly because last November, Bugatti's design director Achim Anscheidt revealed the company's super-exclusive clients own an average of 42 cars each. That's a pretty hard-to-comprehend statistic for many of us to get to grips with, which doesn't get easier when you find out they each also average 1.7 jets and 1.4 yachts too.

One thing's for sure: the chances of buying a used Chiron in years to come with a lot of miles on the clock seem highly unlikely.