J.F. MUSIAL: Welcome to Angelholm, Sweden, about an
hour north of Copenhagen, and like most European cities,
it's beautiful, both the scenery and the people.
Sweden has had a great legacy of innovation design and
engineering, especially in aerospace and automotive.
Think of Volvo.
Think of Saab.
But what if you mixed the two, aerospace and automotive?
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: I had a lifelong dream to start
my car company and build cars.
It started when I was five years old.
I mean, I got the question, always, why do
you have this dream?
And I couldn't really answer.
I didn't really know.
And then I started thinking.
I said, when I was five years, I saw this Norwegian animated
stop motion movie about a bicycle repairman who built a
fantastic racing car up on a mountaintop in Norway, and
took it to LeMans and won over the establishment.
And I was so fascinated by this movie, I remember, when I
walked out of the movies, that I said to myself, that's what
I want to do when I grow up.
And when you're like five years old, you don't really
think about--
fiction or reality.
It's kind of intertwined.
And you're really impressionable.
So I think that was what was the triggering me to do this
and it's just stuck with me.
I was kind of pre-programmed to do this from that day on.
When I started the company, I was only 22.
J.F. MUSIAL: Is that so?
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: So I've always had a keen
interest for engineering, technical things and worked
with cars and mopeds and boats and electronical things.
But I never really started it officially.
So we have, of course, a bunch of engineers here that are
trained engineers, but I'm kind of more like an inventor
or something like that.
So this is our development room for all the carbon fiber
parts that we use in our cars, so we have all the technology,
all the carbon fiber technology
proprietary to our company.
We started developing carbon fiber parts back in 1996 for
the first time.
So we have quite a vast experience of special
manufacturing carbon fiber parts for cars.
What you can see here is the material that is the visible
part of the carbon.
It's kind of a twill weave.
And there are different types of carbon fiber.
There are uni-directional, different weaves, different
directions depending on the need, the
stiffness, the strength.
We always want to optimize to keep the weight down and the
costs down of the carbon fiber and to make the car as light
as possible.
So the tools, I would say are either made out of--
the tools are large.
They're made out of carbon fiber to make them not too
cumbersome and heavy to deal with.
And they have exactly the same heat expansion as the part
itself, so there needs to be no
compensation for thermal expansion.
But smaller parts we machine most of the time straight out
of a billet aluminum.
So here, for example, we have a lamp clusters.
We have turbo tubing.
Here we have a tool for intake plenum.
So, then we have a lot of turbo tubes made up here.
So what you're seeing here is a vacuum bagging
process, where we--
we only use the most extreme type of carbon fiber material
which is called the pre-preg from Advanced Composite Group
in England.
And it's the same material you make--
well again, fighter jets or Indy cars, or F1 cars out of.
In our carbon fiber monocoque, we actually have aluminum
honeycomb inside.
And this is very unusual for a road car.
I think, well, let's say most Formula One carbon tops, they
use aluminum honeycomb.
The advantage of aluminum honeycomb, compared to other
types of core structures or other types of honeycomb
materials, is that it's very crash absorbent and it holds
the pieces together very well in an accident situation.
But the negative side is it's very expensive to work with
and takes a long time to implement.
And as far as I'm aware, we're the only road car manufacturer
with a carbon fiber monocoque that actually use aluminum
honeycomb in the monocoque.
So it makes it basically safer, extremely strong.
But it takes more time and more cost.
But I think, in a car like this, that's acceptable.
If you look at these two pieces, they almost have the
same stiffness, but this has the core inside.
And this is just solid carbon.
So it saves a lot of weight.
You maintain the stiffness, but of course, you reduce some
of this strength due to that it's less carbon.
But still, it's massively stronger than anything else of
the same size, shape and weight.
So what we're seeing here is what we call Station 2.
By this time, we've made all the carbon fiber bits and
pieces and received them from our suppliers.
And then we put them on this fixture and pre-fit everything
prior to paint, and make sure everything aligns perfectly.
And if there are any specific customer demands to the body
work, we adjust it here and custom fabricate parts, if
there's a need for that.
And then we take it all apart and send it to the paint shop.
J.F. MUSIAL: Is everything painted here?
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: Everything is painted here.
I jokingly say that when people ask how much can you
customize, and I say, well, if you pay us enough, we can
build you a helicopter.
J.F. MUSIAL: So I must ask.
How old are you?
ROBERT BERWANSKI: I'm 24.
J.F. MUSIAL: 24 years old and you're the test driver for
Koenigsegg.
You must love it.
ROBERT BERWANSKI: I love it.
I seriously do.
J.F. MUSIAL: So this is my first time in a Koenigsegg.
Let's see how it does.
ROBERT BERWANSKI: Yeah, I can show you how it runs.
That's the interesting bit.
J.F. MUSIAL: Let's see how it goes.
And I love the fact that you have your own private runway
to do whatever you want.
ROBERT BERWANSKI: We need that.
J.F. MUSIAL: So what do we [INAUDIBLE]?
That's 100 kilometers an hour, right there.
In seventh gear, so it's a seven-speed gear box.
ROBERT BERWANSKI: And now we're on 1,600 revs.
J.F. MUSIAL: Got it.
ROBERT BERWANSKI: So actually, on the highway, it's quite
economic for the car it is.
But you don't usually do that.
Here you have 1,200 horsepower.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: So then we take the parts into
our paint department.
You can actually see them spraying it.
J.F. MUSIAL: And is any color possible?
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: Any color is pretty
much possible, yes.
We have our own mixing room.
We, actually, even come up with our own paint mixtures.
We're very proud of our paint result because we put a lot of
effort into it.
Let's say that the thickness of the clear coat is about
three, four times that of a normal production car.
That adds a little bit of weight, but it also means you
get a fantastic gloss and the ability to polish for a long
time and polish out scratches and stuff like that.
And you get this very deep sensation when
you look at the car.
And there's a lot of specialist polishing companies
around the world that work with all these hypercars and
many of them tell us that they really like to work on our
cars because they're really the top.
What I noted was that people close the door like this and
then they want to walk away.
They didn't want to push it down and then push it in.
Because a 2-step motion is not natural.
J.F. MUSIAL: Especially for a door.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: You're not used to that.
People are used to slamming the door and going.
And here you have to push it down and then push it in.
So I said, there must be a way that can
be done in one motion.
And that's when I came up with this idea that it's actually
not a 2-step process.
And most people, at the time, thought that's impossible
because how can you slide in and down at the same time
without hitting and getting the rubber seals
to seal and so on.
And that's where we have to really engineer the whole
entry of the car to the movement of the hinge, and the
movement of the hinge to the entry of the car.
A properly engineered part, when you look
at it, looks natural.
But to get the complex function looking simple and
natural, that's really difficult.
So we spent thousands of hours developing this hinge.
And it's not only the hinge, it's how it's combined with
the whole car.
It's the shape of the door.
It's the angle of the door seals.
It's how the door seals look.
It's how it interacts with the roof, how the door interacts
with the roof, how it interacts with the
body, when it's open.
So it's kind of a parallelogram here, and then
you have the helical cut gears here, hydraulic damper.
The door mounts to this portion here, so when I push
this in, you can see what it does.
ROBERT BERWANSKI: I'll give it a slow start because the gear
box isn't finished.
Are you ready?
J.F. MUSIAL: Let's go.
Oh God.
That was incredible.
Oh, my God.
That was incredible.
ROBERT BERWANSKI: So that was 300, and this engine nor gear
box isn't fine tuned yet.
So it will go better and it will shift
faster when it's done.
J.F. MUSIAL: That's the fastest I've ever been
[INAUDIBLE].
Right there.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: So this is, basically, a normal
chassis dyno, but what's pretty cool about it is that
we have the engine management hooked up
to this whole system.
So with remote keyboard, when you sit in the car, you can
actually program the engine and see what it's doing.
And on these screens, we can get the power and torque and
everything.
We can take up to about 1,500 horsepower on
these hydraulic brakes.
And we use it for tuning cars, for different types of fuel
for different markets.
For example, we had a customer in Brazil who wanted to run on
E100 instead of E85.
So we made a flex fuel for E100.
And then, in certain areas, they have
better or worse fuels.
We kind of buy in the local fuel, make sure the car runs
good on it.
J.F. MUSIAL: Do you actually bring the fuel in?
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: We do, yes.
And then, of course, we have our own airfield which is
very, very convenient.
J.F. MUSIAL: For any super car manufacturer, you
just need that air.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: Yeah, I think, without that we
could not do what we're doing.
Because we can any--
24/7, we can go out high speed testing and really push things
to the limit, so it's really, really convenient.
In the engine system, we actually have a few
interesting patents.
We're working very much with the new type of valve
technology.
It's not implemented in production, but
it's for the future.
So we have like 12 patents within the company, within the
Koenigsegg group.
And then we have turbo patents, a new type of
variable turbo that very much reduced back pressure when
connected to catalytic converters, and let's say,
well, puts the spool up point at lower RPM, and
gives better response.
So if we go around to the other side here, you can see
this little R thing here.
That's actually a flex fuel sensor.
So depending on what fuel the driver puts in the tank, it
comes in here and it's sensed and then the whole engine
management is reprogrammed, depending on what's entering
into the engine.
So the whole fuel management system is geared to handle
massive amounts of fuel.
Alcohol has less energy density, so let's say that if
you only would run on petrol, the pumps, injectors,
everything, is sized for over 2,000 horsepower.
But when you run on an alcohol, it's a good safety
margin, but we can get around 1,200.
We didn't realize it until recently, but this is actually
the most downsized engine in the world of any production
car engine.
When you think of it, it's a five liter engine and we have
almost 1,200 horsepower.
So you have like 228 horsepower per
liter engine volume.
That's 33% percent higher than any other
production car in the world.
There are 214 Newton meters of torque per liter, which I
don't know exactly what it equates to in foot-pounds.
We have six horsepower per kilo engine weight, which is
100% more horsepower per kilo than the nearest other
production car engine.
J.F. MUSIAL: That's incredible how it's so
steady at that speed.
Oh, my God.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: That was 315.
And you don't need to hold the steering wheel when you brake
either because it's so stable and it's so high.
This is station four, here.
SPEAKER 1: Four, okay.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: Yes.
So here the monocoque comes clear coated in the areas
needed from the paint job.
And we fit a lot of wiring harnesses, electrical systems,
dry sump tank, oil cooler, air conditioning condenser.
This is kind of interesting.
We have a lithium iron, not ion, iron battery because it's
safer, instead of normal lead based batteries.
So it basically has half the size and a
third of the weight.
And we put it very centrally in the car, even though it
doesn't weigh that much anymore.
It's the center part of the car, to try to keep the mass
in the center as much as possible.
This is also why the fuel tanks are actually inside the
carbon monocoque.
So the fuel tanks are in here, the back, and there.
And it's only one piece, like a big horseshoe tank.
J.F. MUSIAL: Oh, so they're all--
That's good to know.
They're all physically connected.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: No, you only fill
it up from one point.
It's one huge tank, like that.
And this is, as far as we can see, the absolutely best
position for a fuel tank because it's, again, central.
Most of it is extremely low down and it's definitely the
most safe area of the car.
It's protected by the monocoque
being inside the monocoque.
And that makes it very complex.
It's like, almost, a airplane fuel tank, if you consider
them being in the wings.
Even though we don't have a roof helping out as a
stiffening structure, as far as we are aware, we have the
stiffest carbon monocoque, whether it has a roof or not.
Because it actually has 65,000 Newton meters per degree's
difference.
And if you look at how massive these sections are, it becomes
understandable.
Of course, if you would put a fixed roof in it, it would be
even better, but it's still extremely high.
Inside there, we have the honeycomb.
And then you have this massive section of 21 layers of carbon
fiber, uni-directional in the correct direction.
So it just becomes extremely stiff and strong.
And the weight of the chassis is under 70 kilos, including
fuel tanks.
And this is also pretty extreme.
The windshield area and the roll bar,
it's all carbon fiber.
There aren't really any metal parts.
Of course, power means heat.
And a large portion of our market is in the hot climate
like the Middle East, and so on.
And we heard many horror stories about even famous
brands, big car manufacturers having
issues in those regions.
Our first customers came from that region and they said,
whatever you do, put as big of a water radiator that you can.
And we told them, well, OK, we would calculate it.
We need a certain size and we'll test it.
And they said, forget about that.
Put the biggest you can.
Everyone can [INAUDIBLE].
That doesn't mean anything.
Just put a huge one in.
So we managed to extend it this much from our
calculations.
We never ever had any issues.
Even parts like this that look standard are actually
specially manufactured to control
airflow out of the car.
This is just a water bottle, but it's our own.
J.F. MUSIAL: Very cool, thank you, Robert.
ROBERT BERWANSKI: You're welcome.
I could show you some [INAUDIBLE] as well.
J.F. MUSIAL: Sure, why not?
ROBERT BERWANSKI: That was 220.
J.F. MUSIAL: 220 sideways.
You are insane.
You have the best job in the entire g-d world.
Robert, you really are--
at 24 years old, you are one of the luckiest people to ever
face this earth.
ROBERT BERWANSKI: I know.
J.F. MUSIAL: You're very lucky.
Thank you so much, Robert.
ROBERT BERWANSKI: You're welcome.
J.F. MUSIAL: That was such a pleasure.
I've never been a car that is that fast at
spin and in the turns.
It's incredible.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: The gear box is partially
developed by ourselves.
It's manufactured by a company in Italy, called Sima, and
we've developed our own electronic differential.
On the side, you can see this black cover.
So we can actually adapt the differential locking
depending, from our own issues, depending on setting
of the driver and driver behavior and track and so on.
And then, we have here, it's not mounted right now, but in
here and it sits hydraulic clutch.
We call this the first single input shaft
dual clutch gear box.
When we shift, at the same time as we open the clutch
here, we have this hydraulic clutch sitting on the same
shaft, which works in the opposite direction.
It actually cloaks us against the casing to slow down the
input shaft so that we can push the synchros much harder
because it's already pre-synchronized.
So it basically takes out 2/3 of the synchronization time.
So it's not that it's zero shifting time,
but it's close to.
And it's so close that you hardly can notice it anymore.
J.F. MUSIAL: I always thought it was very cool, this little
gauge on the side.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: Right, yes, yes.
This is, of course, also completely custom.
J.F. MUSIAL: So whose idea was this?
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: That was my idea because we needed
a custom expansion bottle and it's pretty much hidden.
And normally these are made in plastic, but it didn't really
make sense.
We used to have one in plastic earlier on, but you would have
to look from the back and you couldn't see it.
And we wanted to fabricate the one that was really more
optimized to the shape of the car
And then I came up with--
you can actually see the level through a tube
with a glass on it.
And here, you can see also a triplex suspension which is
one of my ideas I had.
And the reason for it, basically, is that the more
power we got--
Well, OK, in the engine room you saw the wishbones.
And we decided early on not to have anti-squat geometry
because we have very stiff springs.
The car was light and it didn't squat very much and we
want a little bit of squat for traction.
But as the power increased over the years, the car
started squatting a bit more and more, and to a degree, we
felt it was a little bit too much with the
latest power level.
So instead of building in an anti-squat geometry into the
suspension, which has downsides, it actually upsets
other parts of the suspension.
I came up with this idea that we put in an anti-squat damper
instead, which we call the triplex suspension.
So when it squat, it actually pushes from both sides, and it
means double the speed compared to the
normal shock absorber.
So it calms down the squat, but it doesn't, in cornering,
do anything.
You just go sideways.
Unless you hit something with one wheel, it starts doing it
a little bit.
So it's about fine tune.
It's kind of a new dimension, another dimension of shock
absorbing compared to just having two separate ones.
It adds a little bit of weight but it controls the squat and
it maintains a very clean, true suspension geometry.
You can only drive really fast if you feel safe and it's easy
to control.
So you can see how very calm it is with
this enormous power.
It's totally controlled.
When we did this world record in braking and acceleration,
you can do that record, basically, with a finger on
the steering wheel, full break from 300.
It doesn't do anything like this.
It's just track solid, yeah.
ROBERT BERWANSKI: I got it.
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: This is also our own product.
We even go in and engineer all the switch gears and
everything inside these paddles because it needs to
have the right feel.
I want kind of a trigger feel.
You can't go halfway.
It's either you've pushed it or you haven't, so it's a very
clear, distinctive feel to it.
And then, underneath this leather, it's actually a foam
core to make a soft grip.
And underneath that, it's a hollow carbon structure made
in one piece.
This is what we call alignment PDI test driving.
Actually this station goes all the way over there because
that's the washing area.
We have wheel alignment, corner waiting and then a test
track outdoors.
Here we take care of our test cars, our prototypes.
We have four service mechanics in here and they also service
customer cars, for example, where we have customers where
we have no dealers, we either fly these guys out there to
service the car or they fly their car here to
service their car.
But usually when they take the car here, they
also upgrade them.
We have upgrade programs for the CCA test, the CCR, the
CCX, the CCXR.
Basically, you can upgrade a CCX to a CCXR.
And a gear 2 and a gear R, a CCA test to CCR
engine, if you like.
And there is some cross, even though there's big differences
between a CCR and a CCX, it's actually a completely new
chassis and completely new body, and a completely new
electronic system.
They look similar but are different.
But some systems can be adopted backwards, so we keep
the earlier cars really fresh and alive and modern by
implementing the latest technology we have for them.
And as it's being done here at the factory, it's not
bastardizing them.
It's actually original equipment, but it's making
them stay alive and fresh.
We started producing cars in 2002 and now, it's 2012, when
we'll build over 100 cars this year.
But in 2002, we built three cars.
In 2003, we built five cars.
In 2004, it was seven, eight.
So it's, of course, grown over the years, but on an
average, around 12.
J.F. MUSIAL: So in this year, how many do you
think you will produce?
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: Hopefully, a little bit more.
Yeah.
You saw the steering wheel down there and we first
designed it to print out, feel it.
And then I had some ideas about this shape, so I
reshaped this by hand.
And then we have a laser scanner, so we scan that back
in, get into the computer, and then print out another one and
test it again until we're satisfied.
So we can go from 3D CAD to physical model, modify it by
hand, putting it back in 3D CAD with a hand modifications,
re-engineering it, and then out again.
And then OK, a couple of iterations
and then we're done.
So it's really nice to touch and feel and see in reality.
It really changes everything.
If you only do it on the screen you will never end up
exactly how you want it in the end.
You have to have this fast, simple process of going from
virtual reality into reality and then back again.
I found a fantastic factory, 10 minutes away from here,
which was kind of a rebuilt old farmhouse with the marble
floors and thatched roof and it was like
20,000 square feet.
It was perfect, and we started there.
However, in 2003, we had a fire, so the building got
pretty much destroyed.
We managed to save most of the equipment and the parts while
it was in the fire.
We just got everything out.
And then this was still a military area, so the mayor
came to the site.
It was a Saturday, and we were all suited up and said, well,
we managed to get most of it out, but now we don't have a
building anymore.
And he said, I'll talk to some people at the military base.
So we actually got into one of the buildings, next door here,
that was already cleared out because they
were shutting down.
And that, ironically, was the fire station, used to be the
fire station.
And we first planned to rebuild our first factory
because we really liked it.
But when we got all the plans for it and how long it would
take, it would take one to one half year to get it done.
We would have to set up temporarily here.
And we did that at the first site.
And we realized, if we're going to make this work, and
start producing cars and then move again, we're never going
to get it going.
And then we had a look here.
There were still airplanes in here, and he said, maybe this
could be something for you.
It's not a quaint and elegant place we used to have, which
we really liked, but it's practical.
And of course, people think, well, then you got access to
the test track, which is not true, because we already had
access to the test track.
Actually the gate to the test track is closer to where our
old factory was than where this is.
So that had nothing to do with it because it was just next
door anyway.
But it's practical.
It's nice.
It has the heritage of the airplanes.
So we've got the ghost.
When we moved in here, we got the ghost.
J.F. MUSIAL: That was going to be my final question.
What is the ghost?
CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: Yeah, that ghost was on that
wall when we came in here, and you see these lines, here on
the floor, it's where they taxied in the airplanes.
And that's actually the symbol for this squadron that used to
be here, which was the oldest airplane squadron or fighter
squadron in Sweden, from the '30s or something.
And they were called the ghost because before, they had a
kind of modern aviation electronics and so on.
They just flew on their senses and they took off before dawn.
And people could only hear them and not see them.
And then they came back after dusk, so they heard these
airplanes but didn't see them.
And of course, airplane was quite a new thing then.
So they were called the Ghost.
So they have adopted this symbol.
And for some reason, very early on, they adopted the
slogan, the show must go on.
And they wrote that on their airplane, in English even.
Then the show stopped.
And we came here and some of the people working there with
airplanes said, please can't you continue our tradition?
Put our ghost on your card.
Then the show will go on.
And we said OK, yes.
So we said, every car we will build here we will put the
ghost on to honor the squadron.
So that's the story.