Apex: The Story of the Hypercar

The first time a child can run...

You might remember that first time that you ran

and you felt the air accelerate over your hair

and your ears and you thought, "Wow, that's a rush."

It's not about going fast.

It's about sort of being fast.

It's about, kind of, elevating human experience

into places that we've never been able to go before.

You don't feel the, uh, car, it's very subtly, very gently

bringing you back into kind of control.

This, I think, is the biggest change of the hypercar era

is the accessibility of a thousand horsepower or whatever it is.

I'm not gonna say no to an open runway a thousand horsepower car so we go down.

We go about 180. He tells me to slam on the brakes, take my hands off the wheel

while I'm doing it in a car I'd never driven,

in a place I've never been, going 180 miles an hour.

If the guy who has his name on the car

is telling me to do something, I'm gonna do it.

Capturing that imagination, the spirit, of what the enthusiast wants

and what an engineer wants and what an artist wants,

it's really at the cutting edge of everything.

And that what makes it so amazing. It's beyond art. It's beyond engineering.

It's beyond sport. It's beyond racing.

It's all of those things together.

So as long as one manufacturer is making a car

beyond what anyone else can, a child looking at it will say,

"Something better is possible."

The thing about driving

is that you can take the steering wheel

and, with the steering wheel,

try to communicate with the road

and feel a whole range of emotions

that somehow satisfy all senses.

I think things that are kind of, uh, impersonated

and embodies positive emotions and that you work closely with

and put your love into, they kind of come alive.

And I think, uh, when you're in the car

and it's done the proper way like most racecars are

and they really feel like an extension of yourself.

What is a hypercar?

There may be no better way to ignite an argument

than to try and define what a hypercar is.

A car whose only purpose is to inspire awe in every aspect.

The fastest, the most powerful, the rarest, the most striking,

the most thoughtfully designed, the most cutting edge.

And even then, that definition only takes us part of the way.

The hypercar, like the supercar before it,

is the expression, in automotive form, of tomorrow today.

These cars do things that, from a power train

and energy efficiency standpoint, it was science fiction ten years ago.

It's the car that's the ultimate expression

of what they can do with technology.

Really, it's like creating the Iron Man suit as a car.

A car whose price tag pales only in comparison

to the desire it provokes among those who can afford it.

They're big projects.

There are hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars on the line.

They are very expensive vehicles to produce.

A price class above what anyone else has ever made before.

It's the kind of hubris that we tend to do as humans

when we want to take something to the ultimate level.

The hypercar is really the ultimate expression of intellect and ego.

It's where those two things meet.

It's the manifestation of our human instinct

to be superhuman, to have that Iron Man suit, you know.

As a philosopher might say, it's to recreate God on Earth.

But, again, it's also about, uh, an automotive global sausage fest

between these major manufacturers.

And I don't think there's any question that, uh, part of it is just sheer ego.

So it's brilliant. So you've got Ferrari waving its bits about and McLaren going,

"I've got a bigger one than you," and then, you've got Porsche saying,

"We got two."

Some of the biggest players in the sports car world

have bet enormous budgets and their reputations

on building hypercars.

The Porsche 918.

The Ferrari LaFerrari.

The McLaren P1.

These brands are locked in a battle to define what a hypercar is,

and the risk is very real.

After all, hypercars sell not in the tens of thousands or even thousands,

but in the hundreds or less.

There is a market or there is a business model

for small, highly technical super sports car manufacturing

that doesn't have to grow beyond 50 cars a year.

You don't have to be GM to succeed in the car business.

You don't have to even be Porsche or Ferrari.

Just amazing looking at these huge stands.

They've spent a fortune on these things for two weeks

and then they tear them down again.

It's just, uh, shocking in a way, I guess.

Christian von Koenigsegg's firm isn't a global multinational corporation.

But the vehicles that bear his name are globally known

for helping define what a hypercar is.

Christian Koenigsegg is, uh, one of the finest people I've ever met,

an intuitive engineer.

Not a trained engineer, but a person whose intuition is incredible. Uh...

And in his own quiet way, he is changing the car business.

Ängelholm, Sweden is like most northern European beach towns.

It's quiet and cold.

But to sports car fans,

Ängelholm is synonymous with Koenigsegg Automotive,

a company founded by a man whose desire to build the world's best sports cars

reaches all the way back to his childhood.

For as far as I can remember, I've been totally fascinated by cars.

When I was about five years old, I went to the, uh, movies with my father

and saw a Norwegian stop-motion animation movie,

which, uh, was really fantastically made.

And it's about a bicycle repairman who, uh, built his own car

on the Norwegian mountaintop to race in kind of a Le Mans style race

against the established, uh, teams and cars and drivers and, of course, won.

And this is kind of a fairy tale story, but it's really made in a fantastic way

and it's still shown in cinemas in Norway today.

Every Christmas Eve, they show it on television in Norway.

It's kind of a national icon there. Uh...

But I was really intrigued by this movie and said that looks like a lot of fun,

creating and building your own car with a lot of unique inventions

and then go compete with it against the establishment.

So I remember that point very clearly,

that, um, I felt I wanted to do what that bicycle repairman was doing.

Yes, build his own car with his little team

and do something fantastic with it.

It's a dream shared by many like him who grew up worshipping the automobile.

But the difference:

Christian has done just that.

This is an old picture from, um, when we built the first prototype.

This was before, uh, the ser... This car, and, um, this was in '96.

This is Christian and his co-workers working on this car.

This was in Olofström where, uh, Christian started the company,

and stayed there--

He stayed there for two years preparing the first prototype.

I actually lived in Olofström as well with Christian, uh, during this period.

And, um, here's a picture of us back then.

I think it was 12th of... August, 1994, I said, "Now I'm going to build the car."

So I-- So then I did everything, designing, drawing,

uh, creating some kind of business idea I planned around it, a development plan.

And then I started finding people around me who could, uh, help out.

Found a chassis engineer and I found a designer

who could help me make a model of my sketches.

But it took me two years from the day I decided to do it

to have a full running car prototype.

With every new high performance iteration,

Christian von Koenigsegg and his team at Ängelholm

keep pushing the hypercar envelope further.

But it's his latest creation that he hopes will really leave a mark.

It's the Koenigsegg One:1.

The name refers to the perfect power to weight ratio.

Horsepower to kilograms of curb weight.

For every one kilogram the car weighs, its engine produces one horsepower.

This is the first prototype One:1 car

that we're going to showcase at Geneva Motor Show.

So this is the company test car.

So as all other show cars from Koenigsegg,

they start out as a show car and then they become our test car and demo car.

It will be the first production sports car with one megawatt of power.

That's 1,341 horsepower

in a car that weighs 1,341 kilograms.

Usually, we spend a lot of energy and time making our cars elegant.

In this case, as it's going to be a road car

which is also very much focused on racetrack driving,

we let aerodynamics take the upper hand over elegance.

So it's going to look very racy on the normal road,

but very at home at the racetrack.

It might seem obvious, of course,

but the entire car is made out of carbon fiber.

The monocoque, the chassis, the body work, all the aero features,

everything is carbon fiber on this car, even the wheels.

So as before with our Agera R and our more normal cars,

we have the most carbon fiber intense road car on the planet.

And that makes it lighter, stronger, stiffer than any other car.

Carbon fiber is an interesting one because in so many ways

it is revolutionizing our industry and it will continue to do so.

But it isn't the answer to all problems. There's a feeling in the industry at times

that you could solve Third World debt with carbon fiber. You can't.

It's brilliant because it's moldable,

because it's so light and because it's strong

when it's moved in the direction it wants to be moved.

Of course, it's not in the direction

it doesn't want to be moved and that has to be remembered.

Um, in terms of forming the structure of a car,

what we'd call a tub, it's genius.

Almost all parts of a Koenigsegg is made out of carbon fiber,

and we only use the most extreme type of carbon fiber material available,

which is called prepreg.

It's the same that's been used in Formula 1

and, uh, fighter jets and spaceships and things like that.

Exotic materials like carbon fiber were once used

solely in the realms of aerospace and motorsport.

But by the 1980s, a new paradigm would emerge

and it would change everything.

In the past, the top of the top was the supercar.

Everything else was a sports car or a super sports car.

Supercars were sports cars

incorporating race technology that were street legal.

The F40 was street legal.

So the F40 was a car that came together

where Ferrari used all of its racing resources,

where they cared about the aerodynamics.

They put it through the wind tunnel

and they made sure that it had the, you know, the downforce