NEW 2300hp Koenigsegg Gemera V8! FIRST LOOK with Christian Von Koenigsegg

Oh, you came all the way from Sweden. Do you know what? It's actually pretty roomy in there. Whoa. Yeah, it's decent. Thanks for the free flight. The tickets over here were crazy expensive. So I appreciate you getting me to Monterey. Thanks, mate. That's brilliant. All right. So, new V8. Yeah, there you go. So here we are again. Pretty much 12 months to the day, right? Recognize the scene. The car was the other way around. It was. Different color, a little bit smaller maybe. But there's some big changes. Oh, yeah. So here we have the production intent version of the Jamira. Actually, last year, I had no idea that I was going to present what I'm going to present today. Okay. Because this all happened over the last year, where we always saw some engineer kind of playing around with engines. And we saw suddenly the V8 back on the screen. Hang on a second. That shouldn't be there. Yeah, but it almost fits. Whoa, we can't unsee that. That was painful. How could that almost fit? It didn't really fit. I mean, the exhaust was kind of climbing into the subframe and so on. But then we started saying, what if we do a hot V? Okay, let's remove that. Okay, that fits now. Wow. Then one thing led to another. And one engineer on the transmission side said, let's see if we can do some kind of funky wrapping. And then the whole thing has snowballed into this nine-speed V8 version of the Jamira. Wow. So we now have what is effectively, obviously it's a hot V now. And is it hot V so mostly from a packaging point of view? I mean, the only reason why it is a hot V is that it wouldn't fit otherwise. Right. So it was not a small undertaking. We had to cast new heads where everything was shifted around. We had to make new intakes, new intercoolers, a new exhaust system. And I will open this up to show you. Sure, yeah. So, but it wasn't rocket science. It was just moving things around and getting them the right place to fit. What is a bit rocket science is maybe the transmission. When Christian says it's not rocket science, I always have to ask him two or three times to explain it to me. And maybe it's the wrong, maybe rocket science sometimes is simpler. Yeah. So, I mean, we're here a few weeks after you've announced it. So I know that you've managed to maintain luggage space too. How on earth have you done this? Well, first of all, that we could maintain it at all. Yes. Secondly, V8 needs more cooling than a three-cylinder. Right. 1500 horsepower needs more cooling than 600 horsepower. So we actually had three carry-ons in the back and one carry-on on the front. That's right. Originally. But when we started working in this area, we saw that if we make the rear crumple zone in carbon fiber, making this area part of the crumple zone, we could gain some millimeters. And we did some simulation tests for rear impact and so on, and it actually improved on it. And suddenly we could have a bigger radiator in the front and an outlet in the front hood to have more downforce. And now we have four carry-ons in the back and a V8. And they're proper size. Yeah, yeah. They're full carry-on size. As big as they're allowed to be on a plane. I love this attention to detail, how you have the new alloy as the wheels on the wheel of the back. Yeah, they're the same design as on the car. And will this be an option to be able to match the color of the bags? You can have them fully carbon fiber or color matched. So even when you're not on a road trip and it isn't full of these four bags, actually, and I never thought I'd use this word, but the practicality of this is real. It is, it is. And I mean, if you look here on the roof, we have these nice little machined clasps where you can screw in a nice arrow-shaped carbon fiber roof rack and also a nice arrow-shaped ski box. You're going to have to do some CFD on that ski box. We are. There is a sensor so when it's on, the car doesn't drive faster than 300 kilometers per hour. Okay. With a ski box on. 300 kilometers an hour. Yeah, nice and down back then. And talking about practicality, of course, we have the hot and cold cup holders that are now increased in size in the production version. Okay. And on top of that, we have three seats with ISOFIX. So you can have three child seats in the car. So it genuinely is. I know this is a wild word to use in the context of something with what now has the best part of 2,300 horsepower. Exactly. It genuinely has practicality. Absolutely. I mean, you have wireless phone charging, you have CarPlay, you can watch video, you can go out on the internet. You have a fabulous sound system. It's four-wheel drive, four-wheel torque vectoring. I mean, we have the dark matter e-motor we developed as well. But this didn't exist last year. No, it didn't. Never mind this engine. It's an evolution of the quark engine. Right. So, of course, doing all of this means that the program is taking a little bit longer time. But now it is the best version of what it could be ever. It's just madness. So let's just set some context here, right? Do you have a benchmark what it'll weigh? Yes. So it's just over 1,900 kilos, cargo weight. And so that's operating with fluids. It's with 70% of the fuel tank and all the fluids and everything. In a way, that sounds a little bit heavy. But if you put it into context, if you take a two-seater hypercar electric, that's like 2.2, 2.3 tons. If you take a famous French-German brand with a lot of cylinders, two-seater, that's like over two tons. So in that context, it's unbelievably light. It really is. And it's a hybrid. And it's got four seats. Four seats, four-wheel drive, four-wheel torque vectoring. So it is super light, especially with 2,300 horsepower. This is the car that has the highest horsepower per kilo we've ever made. When we simulate this for big tracks, it's like, we don't believe the numbers we're seeing. And also, 0 to 400, 0 to 250, I mean... It's going to bend diaphragms, isn't it, this thing? It's going to be wild. It's madness. Yeah. Crikey. But again, this super tactile usability, practicality, all baked in. So around about 1,900 kilograms, operating weight with close to 2,300 horsepower. I mean, it mustn't seem that long ago for you when you achieved the unicorn one-to-one. That's 2014. Right. So the grand scheme of things, it's not long ago, right? And now here we are with the hybrid. With four seats. Yes, that has exceeded the one-to-one. Of course, if you can have one-to-one with the lowest possible weight, that's beneficial. Sure. But if you take any kind of four or five-seater car, well, with much less performance and power, this is super-duper light. Unbelievable. So back to the packaging then and being able to make this a possibility. At the dealer conference, you touched on and named the sort of formation of the transmission at Torbillion. Exactly. When we started creating this transmission, it is, of course, an intricate thing because it wraps around the engine. And normally, you want to have as few parts as possible and as simple solution as possible. And this is a bit intricate to make that happen. But it's all for good reasons. Because we could remove two electrical motors and two inverters. And we anyway had gearing on the side of the engine for the electrical motors that we revamped into connecting to the nine-speed. So we actually got rid of components and weight by making a very intricate transmission. Mostly based on the Jesko, of course. The actual shifting mechanisms and the gears and everything, that's Jesko. And then we kind of took the space we had for the e-motor transmissions and connected that to the Jesko transmission to create this wild U-shaped wraparound transmission. And of course, in watchmaking, the highest level of watchmaking is a tourbillon. Yes. It's like we have the most interesting complexity to compensate for gravity and temperatures and the most accurate mechanical precision you can have. Yes. So it just popped into mind that this is the world's first tourbillon transmission. Crikey. Because it is complex for a good reason. Because it enables the whole car to happen with a nine-speed, no flywheel, no clutch, four-wheel drive on the combustion engine. Or you can drive pure EV with a four-wheel drive torque vectoring at the same time. If you want. If you choose to. You know, it's funny. We've been filming together now for quite some years. And I think I've said it a lot over the years. That normally when I stand next to you, you've either broken a world record or come up with some new proprietary solution to achieving something. In this, you were saying earlier, you've had a win, a win, a win, a win. And all of this is all off the back of genuinely trying to make something better. It's not there for styling or for doing it just because. I mean, it turns out not having a flywheel is a good thing. Exactly. I mean, absolutely. I mean, it's just pure, more straight to the point and removing things. With the Tourbillon, yes, we added things to be able to have the engine where it needs to be to have a four-seater. And to have the four-wheel drive system with the dark matter electrical motor. But it's still as few components you can have to achieve it. Sure. So it is minimalism with a nice level of elegant complexity. And a great sound. Wow. And we are still using compound clutching to change gears. Exactly what you drove today. Actually, the internals of the Tourbillon transmission, where you actually have the shifting, that is the same. Right. So where you have the differential and the bevel gear, it's kind of on the other side of the transmission, on the other side of the shaft. But there is no differential. It's just the bevel gear. And it's smaller because we don't need to have the same gear ratio. We don't actually need to change the ratio much at all. Because we just have the shaft of the bevel gear going out to these two side clutches that goes out to the two side transmissions, where you have the final drive ratio happening. So you can have a really small bevel gear and compact it like that. And then, of course, the clutches allows torque vectoring instead of a differential. Like we have on the front axle. Like we always have on the front axle. Right. Okay. So dark matter. Run me through this. This is the world's first six-phase electric motor. I would say the world's first six-phase for automotive use. Okay. I think there might have been for other uses. But within the automotive world. And at that size too. Yeah. Right. I've never seen anything like this one. And we're talking like that sort of size. Yeah. It's about this size and this thick. I wish I had one to show you. But you can see a picture. We could splice in a shot now. And this generates around about 800 horsepower. So it's 600 kilowatt, which is almost exactly 800 horsepower. Yes. And 1250 Newton meters out of 38 kilogram. I don't even know how that number is real. So it's a mad number for that compact size. How can it be so power and torque dense? Well, there are several secrets to it or tricks to it or however I should say. So a lot of development in the actual magnetic flux. Why is it called dark matter? So no one actually knows what magnetism is. It's just a phenomenon we can make use of. We don't know what it is, but we know how to use it. And there's a lot of speculation. It probably has something to do with dark matter or dark energy, this kind of unknown in the universe. So that's actually the force we're using to make it work. So it was a suitable name. And then, of course, it's made out of carbon fiber, which is kind of a dark matter in itself. So it kind of was suitable. That's the other reason. So we have very good control over the flux, where we're utilizing kind of the big diameter to get a lot of leverage for torque, but also refined to have a higher output of power at a reasonably high RPM by some clever ways of using the flux. The housing is carbon fiber, and it just removed a lot of metal where you normally have metal. So in a weird way, having more cylinders has allowed you to rely a little bit less on the hybrid drivetrain and save weight there. Yeah, exactly. So more cylinders, but we also make a three-cylinder version still. So it has a little bit less power than a V8, of course. But it's also because we have nine gears to choose from. So you're always in the right power band of the engine. I mean, the Regera and Direct Drive is amazing, and it's torque filled by the electrical motor and gives as much grip as you can on a two-wheel drive car. But here we have four-wheel drive, so we can put more power to the ground. And having then gears to always be in the maximum power band at any speed is helpful and means we could reduce the amount of electrical complexity and thereby also save weight to make the V8 version almost unnoticeably heavier than it was with a three-cylinder with three electrical motors. That's crazy. Wow. And very engaging with this transmission. Yeah, the transmission is sublime. So from a point of view that when you say this is the sort of close to all production spec, it's not only the fact that there is now on offer the V8, but it's also the fit and finish inside, the quality of the materials. This is extremely close to production spec. I mean, it's all tooling, all the bodywork, all the chassis is production tooling. Controllers are production controllers. The engine spec is production. So it is very, very close, but it's a pre-production car with production parts almost throughout. So we're now building pre-production cars, starting to build pre-production cars in the new factory. Wow. We'll push out a few now over the next six to eight months, and then we'll start rolling in chassis for the production cars at the tail end of next year. It's not far away, is it? It's getting close. And given this big transformation we ended up doing, because we could not unsee it, I would say I'm quite happy with the timeframe, but we want to get it out as quickly as possible. Absolutely, yeah. The market is waiting. When you launched the car, and there was the grey with the yellow interior, when you sit in that, and even though it was just a model effectively, it still felt great. Yeah, it still drove. But when you see the production level, the quality is a different ballgame, isn't it? And it's still some small things we're tweaking, but I mean, the end result, and already now is super high in going stratospheric on details. You can start it if you want. Can I start it? Yeah. There's different energy in this thing. This is not your like Bentley or Rolls Royce, kind of four or five seats. This is a two-seater mega car, with two more seats with four carry-on bags. But I'm not saying that it's uncomfortable. It's not. You notice with the Esco, you can drive super comfortably. It's just that alive. It's alive. Though it's really rare in our industry to witness a new product category. Breed almost. Yes, it's a totally different thing. There's nothing to compare it to. I don't know what to compare it to. There isn't, right? It doesn't exist. Well, this one exists. This one does. Yeah. It's just the wildest contraption, isn't it? Yes. But I really feel like you could daily this. You can. I mean, you can drive it electrically super quiet if you want with 800 horsepower, or you can have the rumbling monster. Yeah, exactly. And it's four-wheel drive with torque vectoring on electric as well. And then when you want to rumble, you start up. You can drive quietly through London. Waft on through London, and then you can unleash. And then you have this amazing range. I mean, when we removed the two inverters, we got more fuel tank space. So we have 115 litres of fuel space. So you can run this thing close to it. 115 litres? Yeah, if you charge it fully, and also you empty your battery, you can get close to 1,000 kilometre range on this. It's just wild. I mean, of course, not at any high speed, but just cruising. Sure, but it's capable. Yeah. I mean, I don't think a Range Rover has that size fuel tank. It's big. It's a big fuel tank. You don't need to fill it fully up if you don't want to, but it has that amazing capacity. You can wirelessly charge your phone there as well. And then you have the hot and cold cup holders. So how hot and cold are we talking here? It's a bit over 50 degrees for a coffee, which is a nice hot coffee, and down to like six degrees on your soda. Really? Yeah, so it's... I remember when we did the factory walk and talk about 18 months back, you introduced me to the engineer on this particular project. It's a big project. You've been on it for two years. Yeah, it's a big project. The cup holder engineer. It's like a lot of aerodynamic simulation of flow and ribs and making it light and having this peltier effect. And also, if you look at it, it's metal down there and you have a little surface going up underneath the can to have contact. No, you're kidding. So it's like super complex, this thing. I guess this thing's never really existed in the car, but has there been any rules and regs around making it too hot or too cold? Exactly, we could make it a little bit hotter. Sure. Colder, that's about as cold as we can get it. Right. But hotter, we could do. But then you might end up in... Might get hot fingers. Yeah, it's a shower or something, right? So you have to watch out a little bit. Wow, but generally it's going to keep things cool on a long run. You'll be happy with your coffee for hours. I mean, you know, coffee gets stale after a while. Sure, yeah. But, I don't know, some other hot drink. And there's eight of them. Gluhwein for passengers. Oh, thank you. Congratulations. This is absolutely mesmerizingly cool. Well done, thanks.