j.f. musial: welcome toangelholm, sweden, about an hour north of copenhagen, andlike most european cities, it's beautiful, both thescenery and the people. sweden has had a great legacyof innovation design and engineering, especially inaerospace and automotive. think of volvo. think of saab. but what if you mixed the two,aerospace and automotive? christian von koenigsegg: i hada lifelong dream to start
my car company and build cars. it started when i wasfive 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 abicycle repairman who built a
fantastic racing car up on amountaintop in norway, and took it to lemans and wonover the establishment. and i was so fascinated by thismovie, i remember, when i walked out of the movies, thati said to myself, that's what i want to do when i grow up. and when you're like five yearsold, you don't really think about-- fiction or reality. it's kind of intertwined.
and you're reallyimpressionable. so i think that was what was thetriggering me to do this and it's just stuck with me. i was kind of pre-programmed todo this from that day on. when i started the company,i was only 22. j.f. musial: is that so? christian von koenigsegg: soi've always had a keen interest for engineering,technical things and worked with cars and mopeds and boatsand electronical things.
but i never really startedit officially. so we have, of course, a bunchof engineers here that are trained engineers, but i'm kindof more like an inventor or something like that. so this is our development roomfor 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 carbonfiber parts back in 1996 for
the first time. so we have quite a vastexperience of special manufacturing carbon fiberparts for cars. what you can see here is thematerial that is the visible part of the carbon. it's kind of a twill weave. and there are differenttypes of carbon fiber. there are uni-directional,different weaves, different directions dependingon the need, the
stiffness, the strength. we always want to optimize tokeep the weight down and the costs down of the carbon fiberand to make the car as light as possible. so the tools, i would sayare either made out of-- the tools are large. they're made out of carbon fiberto make them not too cumbersome and heavyto deal with. and they have exactly the sameheat expansion as the part
itself, so there needs to be no compensation for thermal expansion. but smaller parts we machinemost of the time straight out of a billet aluminum. so here, for example, wehave a lamp clusters. we have turbo tubing. here we have a toolfor intake plenum. so, then we have a lot of turbotubes made up here. so what you're seeing hereis a vacuum bagging
process, where we-- we only use the most extremetype of carbon fiber material which is called the pre-pregfrom advanced composite group in england. and it's the same materialyou make-- well again, fighter jets or indycars, or f1 cars out of. in our carbon fiber monocoque,we actually have aluminum honeycomb inside. and this is very unusualfor a road car.
i think, well, let's say mostformula one carbon tops, they use aluminum honeycomb. the advantage of aluminumhoneycomb, compared to other types of core structures orother types of honeycomb materials, is that it's verycrash absorbent and it holds the pieces together very wellin an accident situation. but the negative side is it'svery expensive to work with and takes a long timeto implement. and as far as i'm aware, we'rethe only road car manufacturer
with a carbon fiber monocoquethat actually use aluminum honeycomb in the monocoque. so it makes it basically safer,extremely strong. but it takes more timeand more cost. but i think, in a car likethis, that's acceptable. if you look at these two pieces,they almost have the same stiffness, but thishas the core inside. and this is just solid carbon. so it saves a lot of weight.
you maintain the stiffness, butof course, you reduce some of this strength due tothat it's less carbon. but still, it's massivelystronger than anything else of the same size, shapeand weight. so what we're seeing here iswhat we call station 2. by this time, we've made allthe carbon fiber bits and pieces and received themfrom our suppliers. and then we put them on thisfixture and pre-fit everything prior to paint, and make sureeverything aligns perfectly.
and if there are any specificcustomer demands to the body work, we adjust it here andcustom fabricate parts, if there's a need for that. and then we take it all apartand send it to the paint shop. j.f. musial: is everythingpainted here? christian von koenigsegg:everything is painted here. i jokingly say that when peopleask how much can you customize, and i say, well, ifyou 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 andyou'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 firsttime in a koenigsegg.
let's see how it does. robert berwanski: yeah, i canshow you how it runs. that's the interesting bit. j.f. musial: let'ssee how it goes. and i love the fact that youhave your own private runway to do whatever you want. robert berwanski:we need that. j.f. musial: so whatdo we [inaudible]? that's 100 kilometers anhour, right there.
in seventh gear, so it'sa seven-speed gear box. robert berwanski: and nowwe'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 1,200horsepower. christian von koenigsegg: sothen we take the parts into our paint department.
you can actually seethem spraying it. j.f. musial: and is anycolor possible? christian von koenigsegg:any color is pretty much possible, yes. we have our own mixing room. we, actually, even come up withour own paint mixtures. we're very proud of our paintresult because we put a lot of effort into it. let's say that the thicknessof the clear coat is about
three, four times that ofa normal production car. that adds a little bit ofweight, but it also means you get a fantastic gloss and theability to polish for a long time and polish out scratchesand stuff like that. and you get this verydeep sensation when you look at the car. and there's a lot of specialistpolishing companies around the world that work withall these hypercars and many of them tell us that theyreally like to work on our
cars because they'rereally the top. what i noted was that peopleclose the door like this and then they want to walk away. they didn't want to push itdown and then push it in. because a 2-step motionis not natural. j.f. musial: especiallyfor a door. christian von koenigsegg:you're not used to that. people are used to slammingthe door and going. and here you have to push itdown and then push it in.
so i said, there mustbe a way that can be done in one motion. and that's when i came up withthis 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 inand down at the same time without hitting and gettingthe rubber seals to seal and so on. and that's where we have toreally engineer the whole
entry of the car to the movementof the hinge, and the movement of the hinge tothe entry of the car. a properly engineeredpart, when you look at it, looks natural. but to get the complex functionlooking simple and natural, that's reallydifficult. so we spent thousands of hoursdeveloping 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 ofthe door seals. it's how the door seals look. it's how it interacts with theroof, how the door interacts with the roof, how itinteracts with the body, when it's open. so it's kind of a parallelogramhere, and then you have the helical cut gearshere, hydraulic damper. the door mounts to this portionhere, so when i push
this in, you can seewhat it does. robert berwanski: i'll give ita 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. robert berwanski: so that was300, and this engine nor gear
box isn't fine tuned yet. so it will go betterand it will shift faster when it's done. j.f. musial: that's thefastest i've ever been [inaudible]. right there. christian von koenigsegg: sothis is, basically, a normal chassis dyno, but what's prettycool about it is that we have the engine managementhooked up
to this whole system. so with remote keyboard, whenyou sit in the car, you can actually program the engineand see what it's doing. and on these screens, we can getthe power and torque and everything. we can take up to about1,500 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 customerin brazil who wanted to run on e100 instead of e85. so we made a flexfuel for e100. and then, in certainareas, they have better or worse fuels. we kind of buy in the localfuel, make sure the car runs good on it. j.f. musial: do you actuallybring the fuel in? christian von koenigsegg:we do, yes.
and then, of course, we haveour own airfield which is very, very convenient. j.f. musial: for any supercar 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 speedtesting and really push things to the limit, so it's really,really convenient.
in the engine system, weactually have a few interesting patents. we're working very much withthe new type of valve technology. it's not implementedin production, but it's for the future. so we have like 12 patentswithin the company, within the koenigsegg group. and then we have turbo patents,a new type of
variable turbo that very muchreduced back pressure when connected to catalyticconverters, and let's say, well, puts the spool up pointat lower rpm, and gives better response. so if we go around to the otherside here, you can see this little r thing here. that's actually a flexfuel sensor. so depending on what fuel thedriver puts in the tank, it comes in here and it's sensedand then the whole engine
management is reprogrammed,depending on what's entering into the engine. so the whole fuel managementsystem 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 forover 2,000 horsepower. but when you run on an alcohol,it's a good safety margin, but we canget around 1,200.
we didn't realize it untilrecently, but this is actually the most downsized engine inthe world of any production car engine. when you think of it, it's afive liter engine and we have almost 1,200 horsepower. so you have like 228horsepower per liter engine volume. that's 33% percent higherthan any other production car in the world.
there are 214 newton meters oftorque per liter, which i don't know exactly what itequates to in foot-pounds. we have six horsepower per kiloengine weight, which is 100% more horsepower per kilothan the nearest other production car engine. j.f. musial: that's incrediblehow it's so steady at that speed. christian von koenigsegg:that was 315. and you don't need to hold thesteering wheel when you brake
either because it's so stableand it's so high. this is station four, here. speaker 1: four, okay. christian von koenigsegg: yes. so here the monocoque comesclear coated in the areas needed from the paint job. and we fit a lot of wiringharnesses, electrical systems, dry sump tank, oil cooler, airconditioning condenser. this is kind of interesting.
we have a lithium iron, not ion,iron battery because it's safer, instead of normallead based batteries. so it basically has halfthe size and a third of the weight. and we put it very centrallyin the car, even though it doesn't weigh thatmuch anymore. it's the center part of the car,to try to keep the mass in the center as muchas possible. this is also why the fuel tanksare actually inside the
carbon monocoque. so the fuel tanks are in here,the back, and there. and it's only one piece, likea big horseshoe tank. j.f. musial: oh, sothey're all-- that's good to know. they're all physicallyconnected. 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 cansee, the absolutely best position for a fuel tank becauseit's, again, central. most of it is extremely low downand it's definitely the most safe area of the car. it's protected by the monocoque being inside the monocoque. and that makes itvery complex. it's like, almost, a airplanefuel tank, if you consider them being in the wings.
even though we don't havea roof helping out as a stiffening structure, as far aswe are aware, we have the stiffest carbon monocoque,whether it has a roof or not. because it actually has 65,000newton meters per degree's difference. and if you look at how massivethese sections are, it becomes understandable. of course, if you would put afixed roof in it, it would be even better, but it's stillextremely high.
inside there, we havethe honeycomb. and then you have this massivesection of 21 layers of carbon fiber, uni-directional inthe correct direction. so it just becomes extremelystiff and strong. and the weight of the chassisis under 70 kilos, including fuel tanks. and this is alsopretty extreme. the windshield areaand the roll bar, it's all carbon fiber.
there aren't reallyany metal parts. of course, power means heat. and a large portion of ourmarket is in the hot climate like the middle east,and so on. and we heard many horror storiesabout even famous brands, big car manufacturershaving issues in those regions. our first customers came fromthat region and they said, whatever you do, put as big of awater radiator that you can.
and we told them, well, ok,we would calculate it. we need a certain sizeand we'll test it. and they said, forgetabout that. put the biggest you can. everyone can [inaudible]. that doesn't mean anything. just put a huge one in. so we managed to extendit this much from our calculations.
we never ever had any issues. even parts like this that lookstandard are actually specially manufacturedto 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 inthe entire g-d world. robert, you really are-- at 24 years old, you are one ofthe luckiest people to ever face this earth. robert berwanski: i know. j.f. musial: you'revery lucky.
thank you so much, robert. j.f. musial: that wassuch a pleasure. i've never been a carthat is that fast at spin and in the turns. it's incredible. christian von koenigsegg: thegear box is partially developed by ourselves. it's manufactured by a companyin italy, called sima, and we've developed our ownelectronic differential.
on the side, you can seethis black cover. so we can actually adapt thedifferential locking depending, from our own issues,depending on setting of the driver and driverbehavior and track and so on. and then, we have here, it's notmounted right now, but in here and it sits hydraulicclutch. we call this the firstsingle input shaft dual clutch gear box. when we shift, at the same timeas we open the clutch
here, we have this hydraulicclutch sitting on the same shaft, which works in theopposite direction. it actually cloaks us againstthe casing to slow down the input shaft so that we can pushthe synchros much harder because it's alreadypre-synchronized. so it basically takes out 2/3of the synchronization time. so it's not that it'szero shifting time, but it's close to. and it's so close that youhardly can notice it anymore.
j.f. musial: i always thought itwas very cool, this little gauge on the side. christian von koenigsegg:right, yes, yes. this is, of course, alsocompletely custom. j.f. musial: so whoseidea was this? christian von koenigsegg: thatwas my idea because we needed a custom expansion bottle andit's pretty much hidden. and normally these are made inplastic, but it didn't really make sense.
we used to have one in plasticearlier on, but you would have to look from the back andyou couldn't see it. and we wanted to fabricate theone that was really more optimized to the shapeof the car and then i came up with-- you can actually see thelevel through a tube with a glass on it. and here, you can see also atriplex 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 roomyou saw the wishbones. and we decided early on not tohave anti-squat geometry because we have verystiff springs. the car was light and it didn'tsquat very much and we want a little bit ofsquat for traction. but as the power increasedover the years, the car started squatting a bit more andmore, and to a degree, we
felt it was a little bittoo much with the latest power level. so instead of building in ananti-squat geometry into the suspension, which has downsides,it actually upsets other parts of the suspension. i came up with this idea that weput in an anti-squat damper instead, which we call thetriplex suspension. so when it squat, it actuallypushes from both sides, and it means double the speedcompared to the
normal shock absorber. so it calms down the squat, butit doesn't, in cornering, do anything. you just go sideways. unless you hit something withone 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 justhaving two separate ones.
it adds a little bit of weightbut it controls the squat and it maintains a very clean,true suspension geometry. you can only drive really fastif you feel safe and it's easy to control. so you can see how verycalm it is with this enormous power. it's totally controlled. when we did this world recordin braking and acceleration, you can do that record,basically, with a finger on
the steering wheel, fullbreak from 300. it doesn't do anythinglike this. it's just track solid, yeah. robert berwanski: i got it. christian von koenigsegg: thisis also our own product. we even go in and engineerall the switch gears and everything inside these paddlesbecause 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 oryou haven't, so it's a very clear, distinctive feel to it. and then, underneath thisleather, it's actually a foam core to make a soft grip. and underneath that, it's ahollow carbon structure made in one piece. this is what we call alignmentpdi test driving. actually this station goes allthe way over there because
that's the washing area. we have wheel alignment, cornerwaiting and then a test track outdoors. here we take care of our testcars, our prototypes. we have four service mechanicsin here and they also service customer cars, for example,where we have customers where we have no dealers, we eitherfly these guys out there to service the car or theyfly their car here to service their car.
but usually when they takethe car here, they also upgrade them. we have upgrade programs forthe cca test, the ccr, the ccx, the ccxr. basically, you can upgradea ccx to a ccxr. and a gear 2 and a gearr, a cca test to ccr engine, if you like. and there is some cross, eventhough there's big differences between a ccr and a ccx, it'sactually a completely new
chassis and completely new body,and a completely new electronic system. they look similar butare different. but some systems can be adoptedbackwards, so we keep the earlier cars really freshand alive and modern by implementing the latesttechnology we have for them. and as it's being done hereat the factory, it's not bastardizing them. it's actually originalequipment, but it's making
them stay alive and fresh. we started producing cars in2002 and now, it's 2012, when we'll build over 100cars this year. but in 2002, we builtthree cars. in 2003, we built five cars. in 2004, it was seven, eight. so it's, of course, grown overthe years, but on an average, around 12. j.f. musial: so in thisyear, how many do you
think you will produce? christian von koenigsegg:hopefully, a little bit more. yeah. you saw the steering wheeldown there and we first designed it to printout, feel it. and then i had some ideasabout this shape, so i reshaped this by hand. and then we have a laserscanner, so we scan that back in, get into the computer, andthen print out another one and
test it again untilwe're satisfied. so we can go from 3d cad tophysical model, modify it by hand, putting it back in 3d cadwith a hand modifications, re-engineering it, andthen out again. and then ok, a coupleof iterations and then we're done. so it's really nice to touch andfeel and see in reality. it really changes everything. if you only do it on the screenyou will never end up
exactly how you wantit in the end. you have to have this fast,simple process of going from virtual reality into realityand then back again. i found a fantastic factory,10 minutes away from here, which was kind of a rebuilt oldfarmhouse with the marble floors and thatched roofand it was like 20,000 square feet. it was perfect, andwe started there. however, in 2003, we had afire, so the building got
pretty much destroyed. we managed to save most of theequipment and the parts while it was in the fire. we just got everything out. and then this was still amilitary area, so the mayor came to the site. it was a saturday, and we wereall suited up and said, well, we managed to get most of itout, but now we don't have a building anymore.
and he said, i'll talk to somepeople at the military base. so we actually got into one ofthe buildings, next door here, that was already clearedout because they were shutting down. and that, ironically, was thefire station, used to be the fire station. and we first planned to rebuildour first factory because we really liked it. but when we got all the plansfor it and how long it would
take, it would take one to onehalf year to get it done. we would have to set uptemporarily here. and we did that atthe first site. and we realized, if we're goingto make this work, and start producing cars and thenmove again, we're never going to get it going. and then we had a look here. there were still airplanes inhere, and he said, maybe this could be something for you.
it's not a quaint and elegantplace we used to have, which we really liked, butit's practical. and of course, people think,well, then you got access to the test track, which is nottrue, because we already had access to the test track. actually the gate to the testtrack is closer to where our old factory was thanwhere this is. so that had nothing to do withit because it was just next door anyway.
but it's practical. it's nice. it has the heritageof the airplanes. so we've got the ghost. when we moved in here,we got the ghost. j.f. musial: that was goingto be my final question. what is the ghost? christian von koenigsegg: yeah,that ghost was on that wall when we came in here, andyou see these lines, here on
the floor, it's where theytaxied in the airplanes. and that's actually the symbolfor this squadron that used to be here, which was the oldestairplane squadron or fighter squadron in sweden, fromthe '30s or something. and they were called the ghostbecause before, they had a kind of modern aviationelectronics and so on. they just flew on their sensesand they took off before dawn. and people could only hearthem and not see them. and then they came back afterdusk, so they heard these
airplanes but didn't see them. and of course, airplane wasquite a new thing then. so they were called the ghost. so they have adoptedthis symbol. and for some reason, very earlyon, they adopted the slogan, the show must go on. and they wrote that on theirairplane, in english even. then the show stopped. and we came here and some of thepeople working there with
airplanes said, please can'tyou 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 willbuild here we will put the ghost on to honorthe squadron. so that's the story.
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