Koenigsegg's 3 Insane-but-Brilliant Creations Have Basically Reinvented the Supercar

Yahoo

06-03-2025

Koenigsegg Automotive has recently been on a world tour of sorts, smashing production car lap records at international race tracks. In December 2024, the Swedish automaker toppled the previous record at the infamous Top Gear test track (a.k.a. the Dunsfold Aerodrome) with its track-focused Jesko Attack supercar.
It's just the latest achievement in the trajectory of founder and CEO Christian Von Koenigsegg, who has rapidly become a trailblazer in the automotive space. When he launched the company in 1994, Von Koenigsegg's dream was to create the ultimate no-compromise supercar. And in pursuit, Von Koenigsegg's team has used novel engineering to extract the absolute maximum from every bit of its cars. Being a comparatively low-volume outfit to other legacy supercar brands has allowed Koenigsegg to leave no stone unturned on the engineering front.
The automaker has revolutionized almost every major supercar component you can think of, with many head-scratching—albeit impressive—creations, like flex-fuel sensors and its camless 'free valve' engine, along with these three innovations that help power its mega cars into the record books:
Koenigsegg's four-seat Gemera hypercar brought unique engineering roadblocks: With four seats and two doors, the automaker wanted the interior to be comfortable and spacious without compromising performance. That necessitated the place for an ultra-lightweight electric motor. The result of Koenigsegg's pursuit is the 'Quark,' a disc-shaped electric motor cranking out 335 hp and 443 ft-lb of torque in a package that weighs just 63 pounds.
How did they do that?
The Quark combines radial and axial flux motor designs to optimize what Koenigsegg calls the torque-to-power-to-weight ratio. Despite sounding like Star Trek tech, radial designs are more reliable, while axial designs can pack much higher power density in a smaller package; here's expert Sandy Munro going much more in depth on both concepts.
Creating the ultralight Quark was no small feat, with Koenigsegg utilizing a strict diet of aerospace- and motorsport-grade materials to maximize strength and minimize mass.
The shaft mounted inside the motor is made from 300M steel; thanks to its high tensile strength, the low-alloy steel is often used for landing gear, airframe parts, and high-strength bolts on airplanes. To save weight, the rotor within the core uses Koenigsegg's 'Aircore' hollow carbon fiber technology, the same kind the brand used to create the first set of hollow carbon fiber wheels for a production vehicle. Like many of Koenigsegg's products, the Quark combines special materials and novel engineering to create a pretty incredible byproduct.
Modern internal-combustion vehicles use catalytic converters (sometimes called 'cats') to help convert the hydrocarbons produced during internal-combustion into carbon dioxide and water vapor. While that's better for the environment, cats are detrimental to performance, choking up the flow of exhaust gases.
Catalytic converters are full of rare earth metals—often platinum, palladium, and rhodium—to facilitate chemical reactions with hydrocarbons, cleaning them up before reaching the tailpipe. The clean up job is a two-step process with a pre-cat and a main cat; the pre-cat is much smaller by design to warm up quickly and reduce emissions when you start your car and the engine is cold. The main cat is much larger to cope with the higher temperatures and emissions when the engine has warmed up into its operating window.
These conventional setups struggle as the much smaller pre-cat is redundant once the engine warms up, creating back pressure. This inhibits performance and fuel efficiency, and can even cause the engine to overheat in extreme scenarios.
Koenigsegg, then, simply bypassed the pre-cat after the engine warmed up to eliminate back pressure. That's why the initial 'rocket' system used a system of channels that would direct low-pressure exhaust flow (during warm up) to the pre-cat, and high-pressure exhaust flow (post warm-up) to the main cat. Koenigsegg then redesigned its initial technology to use a set of bypass valves in version 2.0. They claim the latest version—patented in 2011—results in a 300 hp gain compared to a conventional setup. For context, that's a hop, skip, and a jump more than the entire power output of my Volkswagen GTI daily driver.
Unconventional doors have long been a staple of supercars and hypercars. Mercedes had its gullwing doors, while other brands like Lamborghini have used scissor doors, and McLaren has used butterfly doors. All of these designs look fantastic and open up in their own unique ways, but Koenigsegg wanted to do something completely different: dihedral 'synchro helix' doors.
Many of the designs used by other manufacturers looked fantastic, but were incredibly difficult to live with. Supercars often need incredibly large doors to allow plenty of room to get in and out of such a low-slung car. This means they need much more airspace than conventional doors to open properly. They can also often be difficult for occupants to reach after they've cocooned themselves in the car.
That's why Koenigsegg created a door that sweeps outward and upward simultaneously, fixing the pitfalls of the previous designs. Its completely over-the-top dihedral synchro helix name sounds much more complicated than it really is. Dihedral refers to an angle formed by two plane faces; a helix, which is inherently synchronous, is a three-dimensional shape with a wire that's wound uniformly around a cylinder or cone. Together, these words define the two-stage motion of the Koenigsegg's doors.
We should note that Koenigsegg 'robotized' the door action from its Regera model onward, allowing you to enjoy the beautiful motion at the click of a button.
The logical next step for Koenigsegg likely involves its continued involvement with synthetic fuels and possibly more top speed record attempts. For context, the Swedish automaker remains the current record holder in the 0-400-0 kph contest with a time of 18.82 seconds. In the U.S., that's just a sneeze under 250 mph.
Koenigsegg has long been a big supporter of synthetic fuels over electrification. If these engineering innovations didn't already blow your mind, engineers have been working to run Koenigsegg's vehicles on a volcano-based biofuel called Vulcanol—possibly the coolest name for a biofuel yet. The technology captures the CO2 emitted from semi-active volcanoes and converts it into methanol viable for internal combustion.
You Might Also Like
The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape
The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere
Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?