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.
