hour north of Copenhagen, and like most European cities,

it's beautiful, both the scenery and the people.

Sweden has had a great legacy of innovation design and

engineering, especially in aerospace and automotive.

Think of Volvo.

Think of Saab.

But what if you mixed the two, aerospace and automotive?

CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: I had a lifelong dream to start

my car company and build cars.

It started when I was five 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 a bicycle repairman who built a

fantastic racing car up on a mountaintop in Norway, and

took it to LeMans and won over the establishment.

And I was so fascinated by this movie, I remember, when I

walked out of the movies, that I said to myself, that's what

I want to do when I grow up.

And when you're like five years old, you don't really

think about--

fiction or reality.

It's kind of intertwined.

And you're really impressionable.

So I think that was what was the triggering me to do this

and it's just stuck with me.

I was kind of pre-programmed to do this from that day on.

When I started the company, I was only 22.

J.F. MUSIAL: Is that so?

CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: So I've always had a keen

interest for engineering, technical things and worked

with cars and mopeds and boats and electronical things.

But I never really started it officially.

So we have, of course, a bunch of engineers here that are

trained engineers, but I'm kind of more like an inventor

or something like that.

So this is our development room for 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 carbon fiber parts back in 1996 for

the first time.

So we have quite a vast experience of special

manufacturing carbon fiber parts for cars.

What you can see here is the material that is the visible

part of the carbon.

It's kind of a twill weave.

And there are different types of carbon fiber.

There are uni-directional, different weaves, different

directions depending on the need, the

stiffness, the strength.

We always want to optimize to keep the weight down and the

costs down of the carbon fiber and to make the car as light

as possible.

So the tools, I would say are either made out of--

the tools are large.

They're made out of carbon fiber to make them not too

cumbersome and heavy to deal with.

And they have exactly the same heat expansion as the part

itself, so there needs to be no

compensation for thermal expansion.

But smaller parts we machine most of the time straight out

of a billet aluminum.

So here, for example, we have a lamp clusters.

We have turbo tubing.

Here we have a tool for intake plenum.

So, then we have a lot of turbo tubes made up here.

So what you're seeing here is a vacuum bagging

process, where we--

we only use the most extreme type of carbon fiber material

which is called the pre-preg from Advanced Composite Group

in England.

And it's the same material you make--

well again, fighter jets or Indy cars, or F1 cars out of.

In our carbon fiber monocoque, we actually have aluminum

honeycomb inside.

And this is very unusual for a road car.

I think, well, let's say most Formula One carbon tops, they

use aluminum honeycomb.

The advantage of aluminum honeycomb, compared to other

types of core structures or other types of honeycomb

materials, is that it's very crash absorbent and it holds

the pieces together very well in an accident situation.

But the negative side is it's very expensive to work with

and takes a long time to implement.

And as far as I'm aware, we're the only road car manufacturer

with a carbon fiber monocoque that actually use aluminum

honeycomb in the monocoque.

So it makes it basically safer, extremely strong.

But it takes more time and more cost.

But I think, in a car like this, that's acceptable.

If you look at these two pieces, they almost have the

same stiffness, but this has the core inside.

And this is just solid carbon.

So it saves a lot of weight.

You maintain the stiffness, but of course, you reduce some

of this strength due to that it's less carbon.

But still, it's massively stronger than anything else of

the same size, shape and weight.

So what we're seeing here is what we call Station 2.

By this time, we've made all the carbon fiber bits and

pieces and received them from our suppliers.

And then we put them on this fixture and pre-fit everything

prior to paint, and make sure everything aligns perfectly.

And if there are any specific customer demands to the body

work, we adjust it here and custom fabricate parts, if

there's a need for that.

And then we take it all apart and send it to the paint shop.

J.F. MUSIAL: Is everything painted here?

CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: Everything is painted here.

I jokingly say that when people ask how much can you

customize, and I say, well, if you 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 and you'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 first time in a Koenigsegg.

Let's see how it does.

ROBERT BERWANSKI: Yeah, I can show you how it runs.

That's the interesting bit.

J.F. MUSIAL: Let's see how it goes.

And I love the fact that you have your own private runway

to do whatever you want.

ROBERT BERWANSKI: We need that.

J.F. MUSIAL: So what do we [INAUDIBLE]?

That's 100 kilometers an hour, right there.

In seventh gear, so it's a seven-speed gear box.

ROBERT BERWANSKI: And now we'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 1,200 horsepower.

CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: So then we take the parts into

our paint department.

You can actually see them spraying it.

J.F. MUSIAL: And is any color possible?

CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: Any color is pretty

much possible, yes.

We have our own mixing room.

We, actually, even come up with our own paint mixtures.

We're very proud of our paint result because we put a lot of

effort into it.

Let's say that the thickness of the clear coat is about

three, four times that of a normal production car.

That adds a little bit of weight, but it also means you

get a fantastic gloss and the ability to polish for a long

time and polish out scratches and stuff like that.

And you get this very deep sensation when

you look at the car.

And there's a lot of specialist polishing companies

around the world that work with all these hypercars and

many of them tell us that they really like to work on our

cars because they're really the top.

What I noted was that people close the door like this and

then they want to walk away.

They didn't want to push it down and then push it in.

Because a 2-step motion is not natural.

J.F. MUSIAL: Especially for a door.

CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: You're not used to that.

People are used to slamming the door and going.

And here you have to push it down and then push it in.

So I said, there must be a way that can

be done in one motion.

And that's when I came up with this 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 in and down at the same time

without hitting and getting the rubber seals

to seal and so on.

And that's where we have to really engineer the whole

entry of the car to the movement of the hinge, and the

movement of the hinge to the entry of the car.

A properly engineered part, when you look

at it, looks natural.

But to get the complex function looking simple and

natural, that's really difficult.

So we spent thousands of hours developing 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 of the door seals.

It's how the door seals look.

It's how it interacts with the roof, how the door interacts

with the roof, how it interacts with the

body, when it's open.

So it's kind of a parallelogram here, and then

you have the helical cut gears here, hydraulic damper.

The door mounts to this portion here, so when I push

this in, you can see what it does.

ROBERT BERWANSKI: I'll give it a 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.

That was incredible.

ROBERT BERWANSKI: So that was 300, and this engine nor gear

box isn't fine tuned yet.

So it will go better and it will shift

faster when it's done.

J.F. MUSIAL: That's the fastest I've ever been

[INAUDIBLE].

Right there.

CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: So this is, basically, a normal

chassis dyno, but what's pretty cool about it is that

we have the engine management hooked up

to this whole system.

So with remote keyboard, when you sit in the car, you can

actually program the engine and see what it's doing.

And on these screens, we can get the power and torque and

everything.

We can take up to about 1,500 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 customer in Brazil who wanted to run on

E100 instead of E85.

So we made a flex fuel for E100.

And then, in certain areas, they have

better or worse fuels.

We kind of buy in the local fuel, make sure the car runs

good on it.

J.F. MUSIAL: Do you actually bring the fuel in?

CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: We do, yes.

And then, of course, we have our own airfield which is

very, very convenient.

J.F. MUSIAL: For any super car 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 speed testing and really push things

to the limit, so it's really, really convenient.

In the engine system, we actually have a few

interesting patents.

We're working very much with the new type of valve