Christian von Koenigsegg: Whiz Kid:
According to the company's web site, Christian von Koenigsegg has been dreaming of building the perfect sports car since he was five. Along the road to making that dream a reality, he invented (and abandoned) a device called the Chip Player, a forefather of the iPod, and an early version of the Click! snap-together flooring system. Von Koenigsegg was bored with running his import/export company, though, and so in 1994, at the advanced age of 22, he set up Koenigsegg Automotive to funnel his supercar ambitions into a real-world automobile. The emblem, a colorful shield, is a riff on the Koenigsegg family coat of arms.
From Prototype to Production:
Von Koenigsegg himself sketched and modeled the cars he wanted to build. In 1996, two years after he launched the company, a working prototype with full interior was completed. In 2002, the Koenigsegg CC8S was crash-tested and European-legal, and serial production of the company's first model began. Numbers are still small, though: from the start of production through the end of 2007, only 55 Koenigseggs of any kind had been sold. In 2003, a fire forced the company to move to a new facility, one that had been used by the Swedish Air Force. Koenigsegg uses the air strip to test cars at high speed.
Model History:
That first prototype, built by Christian von Koenigsegg and his friends, was called the CC -- and yes, it still runs and drives. The CC8S, the company's first production car, debuted in Paris in 2000, and was followed by the CCR in 2004. The next year, the CCR would wrench the world speed record for production cars away from the McLaren F1, a supercar that ceased to be built in the late 1990s. In 2006, the CCX debuted, and in 2007 the ethanol-powered CCXR came on the scene. And in 2009, the Koenigsegg Quant one-off electric-powered car was developed for a customer.
Built to Go Fast:
Each Koenigsegg car is built to order with more than 300 hand-formed carbon-fiber parts. The entire body and chassis are carbon fiber, and the cars have been crash tested extensively to uphold their countrymen's reputation for safe cars, even at speeds in excess of 250 mph. The carbon-fiber roof lifts out and stows away in the front compartment, as the supercharged 4.7-liter aluminum V8 engine is mounted behind the driver. This engine is capable of 806 hp using high-octane gasoline, but the flex-fuel capable CCXR model gets a whopping 1018 hp when you put ethanol in the tank.
Koenigsegg and Saab: Born from Jets:
In the summer of 2009, after General Motors declared bankruptcy, Koenigsegg made a move to buy fellow Swedish car company Saab from the American automaker. While Saab builds as many cars in an hour as the supercar company builds in a year, Koenigsegg was the only auto builder on the short list of potential buyers. Given that Koenigsegg's headquarters are in an old air force hangar, though, and Saabs are famously "Born from Jets," the deal seemed like it would fly.
