The 1140 hp Heart of a Hypercar - /Inside Koenigsegg

[MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Christian Von Koenigsegg. I'm 40 years old. And for half of my life, I've been on the quest to be a leader in the hypercar industry, utilizing Swedish design combined with visionary technical solutions. Our latest car, the Agera R, is built in the old hangars of a former Swedish fighter jet squadron. Their symbol, a ghost, is now proudly painted on the back of every Koenigsegg. [MUSIC AND CAR ENGINE] [CAR ENGINE] [MUSIC PLAYING] So here we have the Koenigsegg engine. This is the base engine that goes into all our cars. This is something we're very proud of, because it has been built and developed here in Angelholm from the ground up. It's a 5 liter V8, all aluminum apart from the carbon fiber pieces you see up top, and apart from titanium fasteners, and titanium connecting rods, and things like that. It's a very compact engine. It only weighs 198 kilograms, which is very, very lightweight, considering the power output of almost 1,200 horsepower. It is a dry sumped engine to make sure we don't have too high build heights. We can get the center of gravity down. But also, it's important to ensure scavenging at high G-forces in cornering. So we make sure that the engine is always lubricated. [CAR ENGINE] What you see here in front of the engine is actually, you could say, a chassis member. Because the engine is actually part of the car's chassis. So it's solidly mounted to the carbon fiber monocoque. And at the rear of the engine, the gear box and transmission and rear suspension is mounted. The advantage of doing it like this, instead of having a rubber mounted gear box and engine, is that we can utilize the inherent stiffness of these parts as chassis members, and thereby not having to add other chassis members to do the same job. So basically getting two uses out of one component. Our development process was probably quite different to most other engine developing companies, or car companies developing their own engines, as we did not set a goal what we should reach. The process was based on seeing how far can we go, over a certain period of time. So we have here our own engine dyno, chassis dyno, and airfield available to us 24/7. We have really ample opportunities to test these things to the limit. We also tune these engines in the dyno and in the chassis dyno with different fuels for different markets. For example, China has completely different fuel to Europe. In Brazil, they basically only have pure alcohol fuel, which is a challenge. Because it really needs a lot of the capacity from the fuel system, as there is not as much energy in alcohol like in normal petrol. So it's even tougher than E85, which is 85% alcohol. And we manage to tune that, in house here, with our own equipment, our own software, hardware, to get it performing really, really well. [CAR ENGINE] What we see here is our engine management system. And this is something quite unique, as well. Because we have developed the hardware, the circuit boards, the casing, the software, the interface, everything for it in house. Also for the transmission, we have a similar box for the transmission that communicates over cam with the engine management so that they work together. This is something not even large car corporations normally do. They have companies like Bosch, Visteon, Delphi, developing control units, having their departments set up the software, doing base programming. And they're basically farming that out. We're a small company. And we need flexibility. And the companies I just mentioned are big corporations used to mass volume, large accounts, and are not that flexible for companies like us. And we're really, really happy that we have done it. Because it enables us, as soon as we have an idea we want to test, some new philosophy of how to interact with gear box engine management, driveability, performance, controlling heat, controlling the combustion process-- when we have ideas, we can easily test them. There is no bureaucracy. It's just from one day to another. So what we see here at the back side of the engine, which is quite interesting, this is our flex fuel sensor. So basically what that does, it analyzes what kind of fuel it is that's passing through it. So we can sense the difference between alcohol and normal petrol, basically. And when it senses a certain amount of alcohol inside the fuel, it readjusts the amount of timing, the timing of the spark, the amount of fuel going into the engine instantaneously, on the fly. You don't have to stop or reset anything. It just does it automatically. It enables the engine to be flex fuel. We pioneered this system for hypercars in 2007, with the CCXR. It was the first environmentally conscious hypercar ever. Now we're seeing other brands really getting into this side of the business, with the Porsche 918. We hear about the new Enzo coming out, or the new McLaren P1. They're all talking about some kind of green technology to both enhance performance, but also to have a smaller CO2 footprint. When you want to be green with a hypercar, you also have to make sure you get a bonus in something else, like performance. Because only being green is not good enough. [CAR ENGINE] So the technology we are developing here for our hypercars have maximum performance, with a small CO2 footprint, with a not too big and heavy engine. You will see this kind of technology trickle down to more normal cars. So it's kind of easy to understand what would happen. If you would take our technology and downsize it to a 1.3 liter engine, you would have a 1.3 liter engine, flex-fuel capable, with 300 horsepower, weighing around 50 kilos, or something like that. So it's basically an engine, equivalent to your normal sized V8, but only a 1.3 liter, probably three cylinder engine. So it's really amazing what the future will bring in terms of efficiency, weight, and size reduction when it comes to combustion technology and combustion engines. Many people are still saying that the combustion engine has reached its development cycle. And it's difficult to optimize it. But there's still so much room to do new things to really, really improve it drastically. [CAR ENGINE] We built them as good as we could, and as strong as we could. Then we put them on the dyno, or in a test car driving up and down on the airfield, to see how far could we push it. What will break? And then, when we found a weak spot, we reinforced that and made it better, and did that again. And did that again. And found a new weak spot at a higher level. Analyzed that, modified it, and lifted the bar again. So this engine, or the car itself, was never designed to meet a certain goal. It's been designed to see how far can we go. And that is the development process we are following. That's why we are presently, when it comes to our competition, we have much higher horsepower. Because we did not benchmark. We just looked how far can we go. And to be honest, it might sound strange. Even with 1,140 horsepower, it has a safety margin. It is truly remarkably extreme. [CAR ENGINE] [MUSIC PLAYING]