Koniwhat?

If you’ve never heard the name Koenigsegg, that might be about to change over the coming years.

The “small Swedish automaker” is almost a household name in Europe. Koenigsegg’s handbuilt hyper cars (higher performance than high performance cars) are completely custom built from the screws to the engine to the glass, and breaks the mould in almost every aspect of carmaking.

A lot of the language in this world only die-hard car lovers will understand, but one of the simpler concepts is that by building everything themselves and not relying on outside manufacturers for any component, they can do things like provide their latest car with both automatic and manual transmission in the one car – and no, it’s not like your auto with D, 3, 2 and 1 – it’s a real manual with an actual clutch pedal and gear-shifter that you can stall, or also auto where you don’t need to do anything but drive. That’s pretty wild – you can read an explanation about that here.

Reading about some of their latest innovations in hybrid and electric motor tech, one comment stood out to me:

“I don’t think it’s possible to understate how important what Koenigsegg is doing is, or how truly innovative his engineering is. He’s designing some incredibly compact and powerful electric drive units, but he’s not just inventing elements and components, he’s turning drivetrain design on its head. The Regera has a three-cylinder, 2.0L ICE that puts out 600hp and drives the wheels directly oh and it’s a plug-in hybrid that uses the electric motors as its lower “transmission” gears. And it all actually works. And it goes like a bat out of hell. And it gets incredibly low emissions for its titanic power output. That’s some wild sh*t.”

I suspect some of this innovative technology will have interest from other carmakers, who are very used to borrowing ideas from other carmakers.

A Koni will set you back like 4 million bucks though, so I hope some of this tech does spread!