My name is Christian Von Koenigsegg.
I'm 40 years old, and for half of my life I've been on the
quest to be a leader in the hypercar industry, utilizing
Swedish design, combined with visionary technical solutions.
Our latest car, the Agera R, is built in the old hangars of
a former Swedish fighter jet squadron.
Their symbol, a ghost, is now proudly painted on the back of
every Koenigsegg.
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The first thing you see when you see any car, and
especially a Koenigsegg, of course, is the
outside of the car.
We actually do all our painting of the carbon fiber
pieces here, in house to make sure we have full control of
something that is very critical.
There are so many different ways of applying a clear coat
or paint to a car that we really feel that we want to
control that process as it is an integral part of
what the car is.
So this is our body pre-fit station.
Prior to that the panels go into the paint shop.
Here we make sure everything lines up perfect.
If you look at the front of this car, it's going to have a
clear carbon center section.
But here it's going to be paint.
So you can actually see different types of carbon
fiber, depending if it's going to be visible carbon or not.
As we don't want this kind of heavy fabric weave underneath
a painted surface, because it can give print-through,
through the paint over years of time.
This is actually chassis number 99.
And over there, we have chassis number 100.
So we're very happy that we're getting to the point of almost
having built 100 cars.
It's not far off.
A lot of the work in the paint process is about masking,
making sure you don't get paint or clear coat where it's
not supposed to be.
Especially if you have these more complex body parts with
clear-coat carbon, with pinstriping on, and so on.
Probably the most time-consuming part is the
masking process.
On and off, many times on each panel, to get all the
different layers, colors, and schemes onto the parts.
So what we're seeing here is hand cutting of masking tape.
Here we can see a rear bonnet in process.
It's all masked up.
You can see these vents here are all covered, because
they're going to be clear carbon carbon fiber.
Also the center part, here, this here is also clear carbon
carbon fiber, while this is a solid white paint that's going
to get sanded down a little bit.
And then another layer of-- well, the finishing layer is
actually a pearlescent layer, to get a deeper, more
interesting effect of white than just plain white.
So this is probably halfway through the process right now.
One important [INAUDIBLE] for a car that is a collectible
item, or that will last for a very long time, and many, many
years, is that you have a durable paint finish.
And I would say also that the clear coat layer on top of the
paint is thick enough to take a lot of polishing and rubbing
and buffing, without becoming too thin over time.
So the clear coat layer on our car is about 150 microns
thick, which is about three times thicker than you would
find on a normal car.
What that enables is that when we polish the car here, we can
already make it a really nice flat finish surface, with
basically no orange peel whatsoever.
Let's say large car manufacturers, they are happy
to build in a little bit of orange peel to make sure that
any imperfection underneath the paint, from the panels,
does not show through.
It's hidden with the orange peel effect.
But we don't want any such excuses.
And we spend the time, basically, to flatten the top
surface of the clear coat to get the wet look.
And as the clear coat is so thick, it's
also very deep looking.
To have this amount of clear coat on a car actually adds a
little bit of weight, which we are very wary of.
But still, I would say it's weight in the right place.
And we're only talking one, one and a half kilos in total,
to have this type of finish, compared to a standard, duller
finish with orange peel.
And this particular car we're looking at is one of the more
extreme ones, as it has actually a visible carbon
fiber skin through the clear coat.
And not only that, the clear coat is tinted
with a green tint.
And not only that, actually, it's even multicolored.
Because here we have the normal carbon fiber look with
just a clear coat on top of it, and here we have the
tinted clear coat.
And in between we have a pearl effect stripe.
And what's pretty amazing is that these layers, of course,
are done step by step at different
times to get this effect.
And still, when you feel it here, there's no step
whatsoever in the surface.
And to get that kind of result with these different colorings
and layers and inlays of colors, without having any
kind of side effect showing up takes a
massive amount of work.
So just polishing all the parts in the car, after
paint-- during paint.
Actually, we have seven layers of clear coat.
But this whole polishing process is about
200 hours per car.
So it's pretty extreme.
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