Koenigsegg Admits New Tesla Roadster’s Performance Has Forced It To Up Its Game

Christian von Koenigsegg has admitted that, upon hearing the acceleration figures of the next-generation Tesla Roadster, he has decided to make his supercars even faster.

Speaking to Top Gear about Tesla’s claim that the new Roadster hits 60 mph (96 km/h) in 1.9 seconds, Koenigsegg suggested its future hybrid models will be capable of similar performance.

“[After hearing Tesla’s figures] We thought, ‘this is not OK’. We wondered whether it was possible, and yeah, it’s possible. Then we thought, ‘OK how do we deal with it? This is embarrassing.

“In two days we’d thought of a few things. The simplest way of putting it is like this: it’s combining direct drive with the hybridization we have in a different format with freevalve engine technology, in a peculiar layout,” the company’s founder said.

With its new powertrain setup, Koenigsegg believes its upcoming models will be capable of some extraordinary feats of acceleration. In fact, “we’re talking 0-250mph in 14 seconds, or something like this,” Koenigsegg said.

To put that figure into perspective, the mighty Koenigsegg Agera RS managed to reach 248 mph (399 km/h) in 26.88 seconds during its record-setting 0-248mph-0 run that demolished the Bugatti Chiron’s time by some 5.52 seconds. Tesla’s hasn’t quoted a 0-250 mph figure for the Roadster, other than confirming that the sports car will reach the 250 mph (402 km/h) mark.

Koenigsegg thinks there is still a lot of life left in the internal combustion engine and plans to continue to develop it.

“What we see with our engines, we’ve noticed that we’re just scratching the surface of what we can achieve. Here’s an example: if we ignore fuel consumption for a moment… we have a fairly high compression ratio for our turbo V8 – 9.5 to 1 with 1.6 bar of boost. If we drop that to 8.8 to 1, we could boost to 2.2 bar, which is another 600bhp just like that, without putting more stress on your engine because your peak pressure doesn’t go up.”

It looks like the power race between supercars isn’t going to subside any time soon; in fact, all signs point to it escalating.