Of all the countless automakers who've contributed a wild virtual car to Polyphony Digital's ongoing Vision Gran Turismo project, Bugatti — the ultra-exclusive hypercar manufacturer — is pretty much the last company I would've expected to participate. Yet here we are: Bugatti just teased the Bugatti Vision Gran Turismo, "a vehicle which could also be driven on a real race circuit if it left the virtual world," according to the company's head of design, Achim Anscheidt. Eventually, this Bugatti will be available to download into PlayStation 3's Gran Turismo 6, sometime after it's fully unveiled at next month's Frankfurt auto show.

We only have one shot of the car so far (pictured above), which may be an overhead shot, but it's frankly a little difficult to tell — Vision Gran Turismo designs tend to be so intentionally ridiculous that they're often just barely recognizable as automobiles. Still, Bugatti says that it'll be "presenting the new form and design language developed by the brand to celebrate the next chapter in its history following the end of the Veyron era" with this concept — a long-winded way of saying that the design elements you see here will hint at the design of the Chiron, the hypercar that will be replacing the legendary Veyron in the coming year. You can definitely make out a rear deck on the left side here, which could be lifted directly off the Chiron, but we won't know for a number of months yet.

Bugatti is surprisingly candid about its motivations here — it wants to make a ridiculously unaffordable brand more accessible. Here's a good quote from Bugatti president Wolfgang Dürheimer:

Bugatti is the world's most exclusive super sports car brand and Bugatti cars are only available to an extremely small group of automobile connoisseurs. At the same time Bugatti is admired and loved by countless people throughout the world. We highly appreciate this enthusiasm. The ‘Bugatti Vision Gran Turismo' will make our brand available to them as well as to gamers and high-performance aficionados throughout the world, only very few of whom will be able to afford a real Bugatti. They can all benefit from the success of our brand. This is a project for our fans.

Pretty exciting stuff, but we'd still take an actual Chiron if we had to choose.