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 hangers of
the former Swedish fighter jet squadron.
Their symbol, a ghost, is now proudly painted on the back of
every Koenigsegg.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So we're in Koenigsegg's engine and transmission
department.
And I'm going to show a little bit some unique details about
our transmission.
The transmission is a very important part in order to
make the car do what it's supposed to do, corner well,
have great traction going forward, and also good
stability during braking and entry in a corner.
So it might surprise some people that the transmission
has great influence on all of those aspects,
but it actually does.
For example, the differential hugely influences the way the
car behaves in a corner.
In order to have great traction, one needs to have
some sort of a differential locking device, to make sure
that you don't get the wheel with the least
resistance to spin.
The problem is that, if you lock too much, the car doesn't
really want to turn, especially if you have a
rear-wheel drive car.
So it needs to be open and locked when needed, in order
to get maximum performance.
[CAR ENGINE ROARING]
So what we did, we developed our own electronic
differential, which sits inside here.
You can see this black lid here.
It's manufactured here in Skane, in Angelholm, and
designed by us.
And it incorporates a hydraulic piston in this area,
which is pressurized by a hydraulic line that comes here
from our gearbox management system.
And when needed, we get the hydraulic pressure here
pushing this piston out, compressing the disks of the
differential that sits inside here, giving, more or less,
lock to the differential.
This gives the possibility to have the more open
differential mid-corner, to reduce under-steer, give a
little bit more lock exiting the corner, and giving a lot
of lock in the case of sudden lift-off over-steer to
stabilize the car.
So basically, it makes a mid-engine car
much easier to handle.
It gives it higher cornering speeds and the possibility to
put more power down during the exit of the corners.
So it's really instrumental to the behavior of the whole car.
[CAR ENGINE ROARING]
[TIRES SQUEALING]
[CAR ENGINE ROARING]
Another very, very interesting feature is at the back of this
transmission here.
Here inside we have something we call a wet clutch.
And people might wonder what is a wet clutch and what is
the opposite, meaning a dry clutch.
So in the front here, between the gearbox and engine, we
have a normal dry clutch.
And the dry clutch means that it's just clutch plates which
are being pressed together with spring force
that you can open.
And they're freely spinning in air.
There is no moisture around them.
It's just a dry environment, pretty much.
But a wet clutch is the clutch that is in an
environment of oil.
Basically, that's the same thing.
But instead of being surrounded by the normal
atmosphere or air, it's surrounded by some type of
fluid like, in this case, gearbox oil.
And here, at the back, we actually have a wet clutch.
It looks like this.
It's very tiny, because it's space-limited.
And due to the fact that it's small in diameter, we did a
lot of disks to get the desired force of locking when
we use the clutch.
So if you look here, you can spin this shaft here.
You have 11 disks here.
And if I put just a little bit of pressure here with my
finger, I can't spin it at all.
And if I release, I can spin it.
And here, we put several hundred kilos of pressure when
we activate the clutch.
Now what this does, it's sitting in here, when we
shift, when we open the main clutch, at the same time as
that happens, we lock the input shaft at the end of the
input shaft with this hydraulic clutch or, slash,
brake-- hydraulic brake, it could also be called--
to instantly drop the speed drastically
of the input shaft.
So when we're shifting gears, we don't have to wait for the
synchros to equalize the speed between the gears.
That has already happened with the help of this wet clutch.
So basically, we're getting an AMT, an Automated Manual
Transmission with synchros to act as fast as
if it had dog rings.
We basically have zero synchronization time.
We only have clutch time, not clutch time and then
synchronization time.
It's already pre-synchronized with this wet clutch.
Now this is something quite revolutionary, because it
means that we can have shift times that are so minute that
it doesn't really make sense to have a dual clutch gearbox
with much more complexity, weight.
And therefore, it's not possible to have the same
torque capability within the same weight and space
constraint as this gearbox.
So it's basically taking an AMT technology to the limit,
making it shift as fast as a dog ring gearbox, drastically
reducing the torque-to-torque time it takes to shift, but
not sacrificing weight, space, and normal driveability.
So we really like this solution.
And the weight of this gearbox is 81 kilos.
And it's, by far, the lightest hypercar gearbox we've ever
seen or heard of.
And yeah, we're quite happy that we have managed in-house
with our small engineering team to take it to the next
level with these items to make it the state-of-the-art
gearbox there is today for a hypercar.
[MUSIC PLAYING]