Just the same, the chassis is wrong for the vehicle to be an Atlantic. Speaking to Jason Torchinsky at Jalopnik,Sandy Leith, an expert on vintage Bugattis and a member of the Bugatti Trust,told the outlet that "a standard T57 chassis frame [is not] correct for the untraced Black Atlantic. It should be a T57S chassis frame, which is substantially different than a standard T57 chassis frame." The "S" in T57S stands for Surbaissé, or lowered. What Leith is referring to is that lowering the car from a standard T57's ride height meant reworking the rear axle to run straight through the rear subframe, instead of sitting underneath it. The chassis isn't right, so the La Voiture Noire claims just don't stick, no matter what the Reddit user wrote in their comments. It's a Type 57 chassis, one of the hundreds built. Still valuable, but not worth anything close to $100 million.
That's not the whole story, though. Before the production Type 57 Atlantics arrived in 1936, a single prototype, bodied in a magnesium alloy called "Elektron" and based on what is said to be a standard, non-lowered Type 57 chassis, was built in 1935. This vehicle, known as the Aérolithe, is arguably just as much of a mystery as La Voiture Noire.
Its recorded history is brief, bursting onto the scene at the Paris Auto Salon in 1935 and disappearing just as quickly a few months later. It was very likely disassembled when it was returned to the factory and cannibalized so that the then-struggling Bugatti could push more Type 57s out the door. Its body is reportedly long gone—some claim it was modified for use on the missing black Atlantic. However, it's possible that the remaining parts of the Aérolithe could be underneath the body of the car in the Reddit photos. Further, The Drive has spoken to multiple sources who claim to know the car's location: Redline Restorations, a high-end restoration shop located in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that specializes in concourse-grade work.
