Koenigsegg

[Oversize]

Well I’m not sure exactly how I missed all this but for the last 26 odd years they’ve been doing some amazing things! Perhaps I confused them with Koenig from the 80s & tuned out (see what I did there)! I would confidently say they are now the pinnacle of the automotive world. Their cutting edge technology, innovation and quality is second to none. Take a look at the YouTube video attached. Seems like Christian (their CEO) is still very much involved & there’s almost nothing he doesn’t know about their production. And to top it off he seems like a really nice guy who’s still in touch with reality, despite all his success & personal wealth. They say you shouldn’t meet your hero’s, but I’d make an exception for this guy lol!!

Oh a couple of fun facts; one of their cars is an auto (but also a manual) and it comes complete with hydraulic suspension!

Remember the supercar scare of the 70s, with media fuelled outrage that production performance cars could hit 150mph? The 6.9 was one of those cars… Now a Koenigsegg can hit more than double that speed on a very smooth road (or specially designed track)!! And not a negative squeak to be heard from the media! Times have truly changed!

 

[ProfessorExperimental]

Was helped immensely by exposure on Top Gear. Ben Collins (the stig) made it a bit of a mission to help them "fix" the first car to bring out its potential, he was very impressed with what they had acheived but also their willingness to take feedback. I guess it was the back-then equivalent of getting in good with an "influencer" and building market interest off their exposure.

Recall at the time there were a few techbro billionaires putting their buyout fortunes into car projects instead of megayachts and private jets: the guy who resurrected spyker, iirc fisker was one too, and of course Elon (who lest we forget simply bought what would become Tesla from the roadster's developers, kept them on to do the engineering overhaul with Lotus, and bought the Tesla name *for $45k*) - he also tried to ride Top Gear's popularity but misjudged the shows biases and threw his toys out of the pram as a result.

Amid that backdrop Christian (I feel like there used to be two 'a's, but maybe that was someone making a convoluted Saab joke) always seemed like "the real deal". I guess the more recent equivalent may in some ways be Mate Rimac but that's just me interpreting what people who know people who I met one time at a car culture event seem to be/have been saying.

Also: Koenigsegg are 95% of the reason we have E85 in this country, and especially in Rotary Land I can't think of a single serious tuner who would "only" tune a performance engine for 98RON straight petrol unless the customer was dead against corn juice. All those "2000hp" roll racing madlads owe their bonkers performance (indirectly) to CvK.