Euro Snobbery....
While I am not a huge fan of Shelby Super Car, what SSC don't have and Pagani/Koenigsegg, or even Noble does is the wax lyrical of the UK/EU presses. There is still much of the kitcar-ish quality left in Noble, same kind of quality that I find unattractive in the SSC Aero, but yet the presses bang on about how great Noble is. Pagani, Koenigsegg started pretty much aiming much higher market and made it more exclusive, which adds to their mystic which really stems from nothing but perception and good presses. It also happen that even people in US readily buy into that kind of hype. Why else will CNN(in US), have half of their anchors have English accent.....
Granted they probably are great cars, but they don't have anymore substance behind their hype than someone like SSC. They aren't race winners, they aren't some kind of prestige brand, they just popped up and start selling fancy car to rich people....IIRC Koenigsegg's engine originally was a Mustang 4.6 MOD V8....
BTW, I still don't find Veyron as anything "revolutionary". VAG should be congratulated to making it, its a great engineering exercise. But its the wrong answer to a question that was expensively engineered to be the right answer.....and you can afford to do that when your mega conglomerate chairman fully backs you in losing lots of money to make it work....something that is not possible for most of these smaller upstart....
University of Toronto Formula SAE Alumni 2003-2007
Formula Student Championship 2003, 2005, 2006
www.fsae.utoronto.ca