Christian von Koenigsegg Interview: The Technical Power of Lateral Thinking
The Gemera’s hybrid powertrain rips up the hypercar rule book and throws it in the dumpster.
Jan 30, 2023
"Plastic bags, ballpoint pens, frozen chicken, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's how the screaming madness of a 1,600-hp twin-turbo flat-plane-crank V-8, the brain-melting complexity of a nine-speed transmission with seven tiny clutches, and the space/time warp of hand-built 310-mph hypercars all began. The through line? Christian von Koenigsegg, serial entrepreneur, self-taught engineer, and steadfast lateral thinker.
Christian Erland Harald von Koenigsegg was born in Sweden on July 2, 1972, and grew up near the country's capital, Stockholm, before being sent to an elite boarding school in the countryside 180 miles west of the city at the age of 14. He knew by then what he wanted to do with his life—he wanted to make cars.
Today, almost 45 years after he first saw it, mention of
The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix brings a smile to von Koenigsegg's face. Made in 1975, this charming Norwegian stop-motion children's film tells the story of an eccentric bicycle repairman and inventor who builds an equally eccentric car to race a Formula 1 champion who has stolen his engine design.
"I went to the local cinema with my father, and I remember being totally blown away by it," recalls von Koenigsegg, who still has a model of the film's star car, Il Tempo Gigante, (think Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on steroids) on a shelf in his office. "That was my first memory of wanting to build a car. I wanted to be like that bicycle repairman and build that strange wild invention of a car. I started buying car magazines from my weekly allowance, just trying to understand cars from reading and looking at them."
Von Koenigsegg says he still benefits from this way of thinking, of just looking at details and remembering them, seeing how they're different and trying to figure out why they're different. He was, he says, the sort of kid who took apart the family VCR to see how it worked—which it often no longer did once he put it back together. Such natural curiosity, still untrammeled by any subsequent formal engineering training, perhaps explains Koenigsegg's left-field approach to the art and science of building hypercars. In 1991 and at just 19 years old, he founded the company that today is the holding company and still the major shareholder for Koenigsegg Automotive AB."
He’s built some of the planet’s fastest and most powerful machines and is now working on a radical four-seat hybrid that defies conventional hypercar wisdom.
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"I started that company because I wanted to make some money so I could build cars," he says. "I just looked at any opportunity I could find, and I found it selling ballpoint pens and plastic bags and frozen chicken, mostly to Estonia [which had just declared independence from the rapidly disintegrating Soviet Union]."
By the time he was 22, von Koenigsegg figured he had made enough money to make his next move. "I'd proven I could be an entrepreneur," he says. "And I wanted to build cars. I realized it was probably going to take a very long time before I succeeded, but I was young, and I didn't have any obligations. I thought that if I didn't do it then, I never would." It was August 1994.
Six more years passed before the Koenigsegg CC8S (above) was revealed at the Paris auto show. In the interim, Koenigsegg survived on the income from his business, grants from the Swedish Technology Development Board, a bridging loan from his father, who'd sold his own company and retired at the age of 60, and, as the turn of the millennium approached, funds from venture capitalists who'd sniffed the coming burst of the IT bubble and were looking for something interesting to invest in. The CC8S was very much a realization of a boyhood dream, Christian von Koenigsegg's very own Il Tempo Gigante.
"We didn't have any engineers," he says. "A truck driver from the company next door had half an engineering degree and started helping, working nights. He also had a father who was an engineer at Volvo, and we got a drawing table from him, and a book on drawing principles and details and tolerances. I started drawing the suspension. I became a modeler. I modeled the CC8S myself with two other people. We did not have any computers for engineering work until 1997, maybe 1998. By then we'd already built a couple of prototypes."
No more than 12 people in total worked on the CC8S, von Koenigsegg says, and the first car was delivered to a paying customer in 2002. What's remarkable about it is that, even 20 years later, the CC8S feels like a proper Lamborghini crusher, not some cobbled-together kit car. The interior is comfortable, the ride is good, and the wraparound windshield—still a Koenigsegg design feature—offers excellent visibility. Powered by a 4.7-liter supercharged engine based on Ford's Modular V-8, it has a brawny, muscular presence, but it's light on its feet and still very fast.
Koenigsegg Automotive has built barely more than 250 cars in the 20 years since, but nearly all have set a benchmark of one sort or another. The 806-hp CCR beat the McLaren F1's production-car top speed record in 2005. The 1,017-hp CCXR out-powered the Bugatti Veyron in 2007. The 1,341-hp Agera One:1 was so named because its 1,360 metric horsepower propelled a car weighing just 1,360 kg (2,998 pounds).
Today's lineup includes the Jesko—named after von Koenigsegg's father—and the CC850, both of which are powered by the 5.0-liter twin-turbo dry-sumped, flat-plane-crank V-8 designed in-house at Koenigsegg. In the Jesko the engine produces a scarcely believable 1,602 hp and 1,106 lb-ft of torque on E85 (or 1,280 hp if you use pump gas). Smaller turbos in the CC850 mean the engine makes a mere 1,385 hp on E85 fuel (or 1,185 hp on pump gas) and 1,021 lb-ft of torque.
The Jesko and the CC850 also mark a significant step forward in the history of Koenigsegg Automotive.
The company is gearing up to build 1.5 times as many cars in the next three years as it has in the past 20. The factory in Ängelholm, built on an old Swedish Air Force base that was once home to a fighter squadron whose Ghost logo can now be found on Koenigsegg cars, is being expanded, along with the workforce.
"We have brought in professionals from companies like Volvo, Tesla, Mercedes, Porsche, Lamborghini," von Koenigsegg says. "People with the experience of producing cars in higher volume. In total we now have close to 600 people, maybe even more."
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Definitely admire what he, and many others, have achieved in this field of automotive.
