The $131,190 Tesla Model S Plaid accelerates to 60 mph in around two seconds. That’s about as fast as a Bugatti Chiron, holder of every automotive superlative except sales volume.

You’d think that if you were a Saudi prince or Russian chemical tycoon who bought a $3 million Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport, you’d be upset that a mere millionaire in a Tesla could keep up with you off-the-line. But I doubt that prince or tycoon cares. Because pure speed is not the point of a Bugatti or any hypercar. Like vinyl records or mechanical watches, the Chiron is meant to be a relic. It’s packed with futuristic tech, but that’s hidden chiefly underneath an experience that’s designed to feel like a bespoke product from before the era of mass production. You can see it in the details.

Among those details: that acceleration experience. The g-forces are similar to what I’ve felt in a Tesla Model 3 Performance or Porsche Taycan. But the noise and vibrations are gasoline-powered, which is part of what you’re paying for.

Whenever that happens, and you go to brake, another gasoline- and Chiron-specific sensory experience happens: the turbos stop. Four of them have been spinning fans to build up pressurized air for the combustion chambers. When they stop, that excess air evacuates, which sounds like someone exhaling. It’s novel to be able to link a sound to a specific analog function.

As you accelerate and shift gears—though you can let the car competently shift itself—you watch a centre-mounted speedometer, which is not a screen. It’s a physical needle that sweeps over numbers. The idea, the former race driver and Bugatti spokesperson chaperoning my test drive says, is so that decades from now, someone can look inside this Chiron and understand the car better than you would if you saw a black screen.

There are small displays on either side of the speedometer, and the small centre-mounted gauges are screens. But unlike almost every other modern car, there’s no tablet glued to the interior. As design languages change, those small displays will eventually betray their age. But the speedometer, shift lever, the rearview mirror, the knob for choosing the drive mode—by being already antiquated, they’re future-proof. Does everyone use a navigation system from the 2000s? Or a junk drawer phone that hasn’t been updated in a while? The goal is to avoid that look.

The Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport is a shorter-geared, lighter-weight variant of the Chiron, tuned for driver feedback and agility through corners. To ensure each of the 60 examples looks good in-car collections decades from now, the interior is superficially lower-tech than a new Toyota or Hyundai.