INNOVATION AWARD
Turns out building a four-seater with hypercar performance isn’t as easy as it sounds. Trust Koenigsegg to find a way
There are many smart people working with EVs, but Christian von Koenigsegg and his Gemera get a TG shout-out
SSkippy peanut butter, carrot juice, super-sour strawberry straps, ginger, garlic, chilli and sriracha sauce. Not a rundown of my increasingly bizarre lockdown diet, but the favourite foods of Christian von Koenigsegg. A man of fine taste. I know this because his wife is explaining why there are bespoke art prints of the aforementioned foodstuffs in the backstage area of Koenigsegg’s gleaming new double-decker Geneva motor show stand. An odd interior design choice, perhaps, but a perfect articulation of how Mr Koenigsegg goes about his business... he does what he wants. “We saw a hole in the marketplace. The most extreme, expensive, luxury four-seater you can get is a Rolls-Royce. This has nothing to do with a Rolls-Royce, it’s a completely different experience. I built it because I wanted it personally. This is my type of car and it didn’t exist.” Can’t argue with that, and this truly is CvK’s kind of car, one that’s dripping with innovation; from the eight, yes eight, heated and cooled cupholders – “You can keep your milkshake going in there for an hour or two while you watch Netflix and travel at 400kph” – to a mid-mounted 600bhp three-cylinder engine he’s christened the Tiny Friendly Giant. As I said, what he wants. In case you’ve been a little distracted of late, a quick recap. The Koenigsegg Gemera was the star of the recently cancelled Geneva motor show. OK, it was the only car at the recently cancelled Geneva motor show, on account of Koenigsegg refusing to leave until it showed a few customers around and let us photograph the Gemera on its stand, shrouded from the large-scale dismantling project by a curtain.
On our arrival, not one to duck an opportunity for showmanship, Christian insists on a proper reveal: the car emerges from the back of the stand and glides silently towards us. Shrewd move, because dead on it’s every bit as mean, low, wide and gobby as the Jesko – Koenigsegg’s new 300mph, two-seater hypercar – albeit with more chiselled lines and horizontal instead of vertical eyes. Only when you step to one side and it slides past do you notice the extra length... and the size of those doors.
“THE COLOUR MIGHT BE TOO BANANAFLAVOURED FOR SOME, BUT THERE’S SENSIBLE THINKING IN HERE”
“0–62MPH IN 1.9, A TOP SPEED OF 250MPH AND A €1.7M PRICE. THIS CAR DEALS IN MIND-ALTERING NUMBERS”
So, four seats, four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, three electric motors (one per rear wheel, another on the crank), a 2.0-litre twin-turbo 600bhp ‘freevalve’ three-cylinder engine driving the front wheels, max combined power output of 1,700bhp, 30 miles of electric-only range, 0–62mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed of 250mph and a €1.7m price. This is very much a car that deals in mind-altering numbers.
That Mr Koenigsegg is the first hypercar kingpin branching into the world of four-seaters feels entirely appropriate, because you’ll struggle to find a more family-oriented company. His wife, Halldora, isn’t just resident art expert, she’s chief operating officer. Jesko? That’s Christian’s dad, who helped him set up the company when he was a skint 22-year-old with a dream. ‘Gemera’ is homemade, too: “We were having a family dinner with my parents and my mother came up with the name. G-E means ‘to give’ in Swedish and ‘mera’ is
more. So, to give more; you get more seats, you get more space, you can share the excitement.”
Fittingly, Christian’s obsession with building a hypercar for the whole family stretches back almost 20 years, to when he first became a dad: “We had our first son in 2001 and I started thinking, how do I get the family on board? Do I have to dilute the megacar idea if we have more seats? I actually started making seating bucks back then, but the timing wasn’t right, we were too small and the technology to package everything wasn’t there. Two years ago I decided we’re going to do it. I’ve had one more child since then, so now we are four.”
Time to bring in the head of design, recently poached from Bugatti, Sasha Selipanov: “If you just extend the wheelbase of a regular hypercar – doesn’t matter if it’s a Koenigsegg, Bugatti or a Ferrari, but it needs to pack in another row of people – you’ll end up with a car as long as a school bus.”
And here we get to the heart of Christian’s 20-year itch, the powertrain. The Gemera’s interior package, performance and 620-mile total range simply isn’t possible with a V8 shoved behind the rear seats, whichever way around you mount it. Patience has been key, patience until a radically downsized engine and sufficiently slim batteries and motors were a reality... as was wisdom, wisdom not to wander down the pure-electric route like so many of its rivals. Sasha again: “If today’s battery tech was ripe enough to be both lightweight and store enough energy, and to deploy it quickly enough, this car probably would’ve been all-electric. But if you were to replicate these numbers in an all-electric car, you end up putting 500kg on top of what we have now, and decreasing the range. So today, this hybrid powertrain is the most logical way of solving the equation.”
These plug-in hybrid bits, then. Christian insists the Gemera is a mid-engined combustion-engine car. He’s right, of course, it’s just an
incredibly compact, light (70kg) and power-dense engine, the likes of which the world has never seen (see panel, right). There’s also some hefty electrical assistance in the form of a 15kWh battery under the front seats, a 400bhp motor working with the 600bhp engine to drive the front wheels through the Regera’s direct-drive gearbox, and two further 500bhp motors on the rear axle – one for each wheel for precise torque vectoring. TopGear maths says 2,000bhp, but the combined peak is actually 1,700bhp. I think we’ll cope.
How will it sound? Your guess is as good as ours, but three cylinders, like fives, are always off-beat, thrummy little fellows... we’ve just never encountered one with more power than a last-gen 911 Turbo S. Notice the beautiful, top-exit titanium Akrapovič pipes, which create space for the diffuser to do its thing, but also bode well for our ears. “Normally a three-cylinder is a 1.0-litre engine, this is a 2.0-litre so we have similar size pistons, stroke and bore as our V8. Every combustion is big, there are just fewer of them,” Christian explains. “You can really play with the free valves and echoing in the titanium exhaust system, so it will have a very unique sound, a big sound. It’s not a silly tiny thing.”
Nothing silly about the way it looks, either: the proportions are satisfying, not distorted in any one direction. Get closer and the details take over – the delicacy of the full-carbon nine-spoke wheels (19-inch front, 20-inch rear), the blade-like camera pods in place of wing mirrors, the trademark wraparound windscreen and – when you open the rear hatch – the squat little engine hunkered against the bulkhead, leaving enough room for three bespoke carry-on suitcases, stitched with the names of his wife and kids, to slot behind it. A fourth, for Christian’s toothbrush and PJs, hides in a smaller compartment under the bonnet.
We’ve seen doors like this before (Koenigsegg automated twisted synchrohelix actuation doors to give them their full name, or KATSAD if you value your time) on the Jesko, designed so the bottom edge lifts as they twist to clear the kerb you might be parked next to, but never on this scale. Once open though, the benefits are clear – without a B-pillar, and because the roof is fixed and structural so the doors can nibble into it a bit, climbing in and out of the back is as straightforward as dismounting an S-Class. “I envisioned this car with someone driving up to the Oscars,” says Christian. “There is the red carpet there and the star comes out from the back, there is no folding of seats or squeezing past the B-pillar, they walk out as gracefully as if you were sitting in the front.” Over to you, Hollywood A-listers.
Inside, the colour might be too banana-flavoured for some, but there’s sensible thinking in here, too. Christian is not a small man, but he sets the driver’s seat to his dimensions for a “worst-case scenario” then climbs in easily behind it. I drop in next to him in the back and it’s snug – you sit low, hemmed in by the door and centre console – but not claustrophobic, helped by the finger of glass that bleeds off the rear windscreen overhead. The idea, says Christian, is to ensure those in the back aren’t treated like second-class passengers. “You have the same infotainment screen front and rear, there’s wireless phone charging and I know eight cupholders sounds crazy in a sports car, but it’s where you put your phone, you put your wallet, you put your keys, you put your crap. This really is a practical family car, you even have Isofix points back here for two child seats.”
This is the full-production spec car, but it’s also the first show-ready prototype Koenigsegg has put together, so teething problems were inevitable. The cupholders are too small, you smack your knee on the screen in the back, so that needs to be raised, and the padding on the seats is too rigid, but, in the grand scheme of things, these are easy fixes before the first customers cars are shipped. All 300 of them. “It is a new benchmark for us. We did 80 of the Regera, that sold out quicker than we thought. We raised the bar with the Jesko and said ‘let’s try for 125’ – that went in a few days. This is more of a family car and comes in at a slightly lower price bracket, so we thought we’d aim higher still.” Keep eating the Skippy and sriracha, Christian. Keep doing things your way.