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's squadron.
Their symbol, a ghost, is now proudly painted on the back of
every Koenigsegg.
[CAR ENGINE]
So here we are at station six out of seven in
our production line.
And I'm going to talk a little bit about our rear suspension
on the car.
If you want a car to go fast, and especially around a track
and in cornering and braking and all of these aspects, it's
not enough with a powerful engine.
You also need a chassis and a suspension which is up to
snuff to get the power to the ground, really.
So here we-- when I open this, you can see what we call the
Triplex suspension.
First of all, it's very unique.
And it really enables our car to get maximum traction,
maximum level of comfort.
This is actually a road car as well.
But with very little compromise between comfort and
handling and stability.
[CAR ENGINE]
It's basically one extra shock absorber connecting the rear
wheels together.
They have one shock absorber each here going down into the
chassis with the spring holding the car up.
But then there is this extra shock absorber tying the
wheels together.
And underneath here you can see our quite unique z-shaped
anti-roll bar.
So the reason why we developed this third damper connecting
the sides together is that we were getting so much power in
the car that we were getting more and more squat during
take-off, which in one way is good, to get traction.
But you don't want too much movement in the car so it's
easy to handle and that it's stable.
But you still want a lot of traction, of course.
[CAR ENGINE]
Most manufacturers solved this need by changing the geometry
of the suspension so the car can't squat due to geometric
restriction.
The backside of doing that is that it dilutes the geometry
that you need for cornering and the
other parts of handling.
In a way, it's an anti-squat damper.
It means we can have a truer suspension
geometry than otherwise.
On top of that, it has other side effects, as it is a new
dimension of dampening where you have forces going from one
wheel to the other.
So for example, if you're driving on a road which is a
little bit uneven from left to right hand side, you have
independent movement of the wheels, which is good.
But then you have the anti-roll bar, which is there
to stabilize in cornering, which you'd rather not even
have while driving straight on a bumpy road, as it makes the
car feel a little bit less comfortable than without it.
But what's interesting is that this damper actually
counteracts the forces of the
anti-roll bar in that situation.
So when this wheel moves up on a bump and this is not hit by
a bump, but you're still driving straight, this link
here pushes the anti-roll bar this direction, pulls a
similar link on this side that direction, and wants to lift
this wheel up as well, which causes on all cars with
anti-roll bars a certain amount of harshness.
But when that is happening when driving straight on a
road like that, this shock absorber actually sends the
force to this side of the wheel, counteracting the force
of the anti-roll bar, cancelling that energy out.
So you get the same or similar type of comfort in a straight
line as if you did not have an anti-roll bar, which is a
great side effect.
[CAR ENGINE]
Also, the damping curves of this shock absorber are very,
very special.
Basically it's focusing on low-speed damping force.
So when you get high speed, when you hit something harsh
and fast, basically it's not doing much.
It's more for the lower-speed
dampening, where it's efficient.
So there are a lot of different philosophies that
can be applied and that we can enhance in the future.
But the starting point is to reduce squat, increase
comfort, and reduce roll by the fact that we can have a
stiffer anti-roll bar than we otherwise could
have without it.
[CAR ENGINE]
Now at the front of the car, we can see we have a similarly
complex suspension layout.
And actually here, everything is very, very low, to have,
again, as low center of gravity as possible.
But also we needed to make it low to be able to get our roof
into the car, which is a very unique feature.
So we couldn't have anything in the way for the roof to
slide in here.
But it had the side effect of actually also lowering the
center of gravity.
So that's a perfect example of two needs working together
without compromise.
[CAR ENGINE]
Extreme [INAUDIBLE] technology, extreme brake
technology, all of these systems combined made it
possible for us to take the world record from 0 to 300 to
0 kilometers per hour.
It's really all the systems working together.
If one of the systems, like suspension or brakes or engine
or gearbox, weren't up to the task, we could not make a
record like that.
So it's all systems working together, putting the power to
the ground, creating stability, creating traction
and braking power.
[MUSIC PLAYING]