[MUSIC PLAYING]
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.
[MUSIC AND CAR ENGINE]
[CAR ENGINE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So here we have the Koenigsegg engine.
This is the base engine that goes into all our cars.
This is something we're very proud of, because it has been
built and developed here in Angelholm from the ground up.
It's a 5 liter V8, all aluminum apart from the carbon
fiber pieces you see up top, and apart from titanium
fasteners, and titanium connecting rods,
and things like that.
It's a very compact engine.
It only weighs 198 kilograms, which is very, very
lightweight, considering the power output of almost 1,200
horsepower.
It is a dry sumped engine to make sure we don't have too
high build heights.
We can get the center of gravity down.
But also, it's important to ensure scavenging at high
G-forces in cornering.
So we make sure that the engine is always lubricated.
[CAR ENGINE]
What you see here in front of the engine is actually, you
could say, a chassis member.
Because the engine is actually part of the car's chassis.
So it's solidly mounted to the carbon fiber monocoque.
And at the rear of the engine, the gear box and transmission
and rear suspension is mounted.
The advantage of doing it like this, instead of having a
rubber mounted gear box and engine, is that we can utilize
the inherent stiffness of these parts as chassis
members, and thereby not having to add other chassis
members to do the same job.
So basically getting two uses out of one component.
Our development process was probably quite different to
most other engine developing companies, or car companies
developing their own engines, as we did not set a goal what
we should reach.
The process was based on seeing how far can we go, over
a certain period of time.
So we have here our own engine dyno, chassis dyno, and
airfield available to us 24/7.
We have really ample opportunities to test these
things to the limit.
We also tune these engines in the dyno and in the chassis
dyno with different fuels for different markets.
For example, China has completely
different fuel to Europe.
In Brazil, they basically only have pure alcohol fuel, which
is a challenge.
Because it really needs a lot of the capacity from the fuel
system, as there is not as much energy in alcohol like in
normal petrol.
So it's even tougher than E85, which is 85% alcohol.
And we manage to tune that, in house here, with our own
equipment, our own software, hardware, to get it performing
really, really well.
[CAR ENGINE]
What we see here is our engine management system.
And this is something quite unique, as well.
Because we have developed the hardware, the circuit boards,
the casing, the software, the interface,
everything for it in house.
Also for the transmission, we have a similar box for the
transmission that communicates over cam with the engine
management so that they work together.
This is something not even large car corporations
normally do.
They have companies like Bosch, Visteon, Delphi,
developing control units, having their departments set
up the software, doing base programming.
And they're basically farming that out.
We're a small company.
And we need flexibility.
And the companies I just mentioned are big corporations
used to mass volume, large accounts, and are not that
flexible for companies like us.
And we're really, really happy that we have done it.
Because it enables us, as soon as we have an idea we want to
test, some new philosophy of how to interact with gear box
engine management, driveability, performance,
controlling heat, controlling the combustion process--
when we have ideas, we can easily test them.
There is no bureaucracy.
It's just from one day to another.
So what we see here at the back side of the engine, which
is quite interesting, this is our flex fuel sensor.
So basically what that does, it analyzes what kind of fuel
it is that's passing through it.
So we can sense the difference between alcohol and normal
petrol, basically.
And when it senses a certain amount of alcohol inside the
fuel, it readjusts the amount of timing, the timing of the
spark, the amount of fuel going into the engine
instantaneously, on the fly.
You don't have to stop or reset anything.
It just does it automatically.
It enables the engine to be flex fuel.
We pioneered this system for hypercars in
2007, with the CCXR.
It was the first environmentally conscious
hypercar ever.
Now we're seeing other brands really getting into this side
of the business, with the Porsche 918.
We hear about the new Enzo coming out, or
the new McLaren P1.
They're all talking about some kind of green technology to
both enhance performance, but also to have
a smaller CO2 footprint.
When you want to be green with a hypercar, you also have to
make sure you get a bonus in something else, like
performance.
Because only being green is not good enough.
[CAR ENGINE]
So the technology we are developing here for our
hypercars have maximum performance, with a small CO2
footprint, with a not too big and heavy engine.
You will see this kind of technology trickle down to
more normal cars.
So it's kind of easy to understand what would happen.
If you would take our technology and downsize it to
a 1.3 liter engine, you would have a 1.3 liter engine,
flex-fuel capable, with 300 horsepower, weighing around 50
kilos, or something like that.
So it's basically an engine, equivalent to your normal
sized V8, but only a 1.3 liter, probably
three cylinder engine.
So it's really amazing what the future will bring in terms
of efficiency, weight, and size reduction when it comes
to combustion technology and combustion engines.
Many people are still saying that the combustion engine has
reached its development cycle.
And it's difficult to optimize it.
But there's still so much room to do new things to really,
really improve it drastically.
[CAR ENGINE]
We built them as good as we could, and as
strong as we could.
Then we put them on the dyno, or in a test car driving up
and down on the airfield, to see how far could we push it.
What will break?
And then, when we found a weak spot, we reinforced that and
made it better, and did that again.
And did that again.
And found a new weak spot at a higher level.
Analyzed that, modified it, and lifted the bar again.
So this engine, or the car itself, was never designed to
meet a certain goal.
It's been designed to see how far can we go.
And that is the development process we are following.
That's why we are presently, when it comes to our
competition, we have much higher horsepower.
Because we did not benchmark.
We just looked how far can we go.
And to be honest, it might sound strange.
Even with 1,140 horsepower, it has a safety margin.
It is truly remarkably extreme.
[CAR ENGINE]
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