The Bugatti Aérolithe debuted at the Paris Motor Show in October 1935 looking unlike virtually anything else on the road. Designed under the direction of Ettore Bugatti’s son Jean, the low-slung coupe featured an impossibly small cabin, flowing fenders, doors extending into the roof and a prominent raised seam running from its nose across the roof and down the tail. Its body was made from a lightweight magnesium-rich alloy commonly identified as Elektron. Because the material was difficult and potentially dangerous to weld, its panels were joined with external flanges and rivets. What began as an engineering necessity became one of the most recognizable styling details in automotive history.
The Aérolithe directly influenced the Type 57 Atlantic, but even the prototype’s precise identity remains surprisingly murky. The Bugatti Trust associates period images of the Paris show car with chassis 57331 and engine 226S, while other historical accounts have linked the Aérolithe name to chassis 57104. Some Bugatti researchers have even proposed that more than one related Aéro prototype may have existed at different times. Whatever its exact chassis history, the car disappeared from public view after appearances in Paris and London. For decades, enthusiasts have imagined it surviving somewhere intact, potentially making it one of the most valuable undiscovered automobiles in existence. Recent research, however, points toward a very different fate.
The Aérolithe May Have Been Taken Apart
Canadian restorer David Grainger spent years researching the original while his Guild of Automotive Restorers constructed an extraordinarily detailed Aérolithe recreation. His investigation included conversations with a former Bugatti factory apprentice who remembered the prototype. Beneath its radical bodywork, the car was apparently largely conventional Type 57 machinery. Bugatti was a small manufacturer accustomed to reusing expensive experimental components, making it entirely plausible that the Aérolithe was deliberately dismantled after its usefulness as a showpiece ended. Rather than being lost in a barn, destroyed in wartime bombing or hidden away by a mysterious collector, it may simply have ceased to exist as a complete automobile.
Grainger has suggested an even more provocative possibility: the Aérolithe’s body may have been altered or developed into the Atlantic associated with chassis 57453, Jean Bugatti’s famous black La Voiture Noire, the Black Car, in English. That car is itself one of automotive history’s greatest mysteries, disappearing from documented history around the beginning of World War II. If the theory is correct, the two mysteries could actually be parts of the same story. The Aérolithe’s mechanical components may have been redistributed among other Bugattis while its body continued evolving into an Atlantic that subsequently disappeared. The theory has not been proven, but it offers a more convincing explanation than the idea that an entire experimental automobile simply vanished without leaving a trace.
Have Pieces of It Already Been Found?
The story took another turn in 2021 when photographs circulated of unusual Bugatti components in Connecticut. The collection reportedly included a Type 57 chassis believed to carry the number 57331, along with an engine, radiator, firewall and other parts. Initial online speculation connected the car to the missing La Voiture Noire, but its standard Type 57 chassis did not match the lower Type 57S chassis used by the Atlantic. That raised another possibility: could some of these components instead be remnants of the Aérolithe? Accounts surrounding the chassis claimed it had been discovered decades earlier in a French warehouse before eventually reaching the United States, but no publicly released evidence has definitively authenticated it as part of the original prototype.
Grainger has remained cautious, noting that he has encountered numerous supposed Aérolithe discoveries over the years. With an authentic connection potentially worth millions, a chassis number alone is not enough; its stamping and provenance would have to survive serious scrutiny. Meanwhile, the Aérolithe enthusiasts can actually see today is the recreation completed by Grainger’s team in 2013 using period photographs, drawings and genuine early Type 57 components. That car may have solved the question of what Jean Bugatti’s masterpiece looked like. The original’s fate remains unsettled. But the most compelling theory is that this missing Bugatti was never really lost at all; it was dismantled, transformed and scattered, and some of its pieces may still exist. This dazzling Chrysler concept at the bottom of the ocean is another story.
