Koenigsegg Planning ‘Affordable’ $1 Million Hybrid Camless Supercar

Following Koenigsegg’s announcement of a new joint venture with Chinese-backed NEVS (the company created on Saab’s ashes), the Swedish exotic car company is now looking to expand its rather limited and quite expensive portfolio of models.

Speaking to Top Gear, Christian von Koenigsegg said that his company will very soon reveal a totally new supercar that will be positioned beneath their traditional offerings to help them grow their sales numbers from the current 20 cars per year into the hundreds.

“We’ve been looking to expand our offering because basically, our brand has outgrown our production volumes by quite a big margin,” Koenigsegg said. “We have several years of delivery time on the super-exclusive hypercars we’re building today.

“But we do think if we make a super-exclusive, custom built supercar at a slightly lower price (around 1 million euros, or $1,14 million) we could get the volumes into the hundreds.”

The recently announced joint venture with NEVS will help Koenigsegg with their new supercar, especially when it comes to its powertrain.

“Our ambition is that this car will be completely CO2 neutral,” Christian says. Koenigsegg plans to combine their ‘freevalve’ camless combustion engine technology with electrification, making the upcoming ‘baby’ Koenigsegg a hybrid supercar.

“Given the freevalve technology, we can actually cold-start the car on pure alcohol, down to -30 degrees Celsius, so there’s no need for any fossil fuel mix then. The idea is to prove to the world that even a combustion engine can be completely CO2 neutral,” he adds.

“I think having a smaller battery pack and combining it with a CO2 neutral combustion engine is a very enticing, exciting, lightweight, sporty solution for a sports car”.

The new supercar -expected to debut in 2020- will look “very obviously” like a Koenigsegg but at the same time, it will be slightly different than the brand’s hypercars. Christian sees a gap in the market, although he didn’t explain what this gap is, only promising that it will be “an extremely sporty car”.