When you’re in the business of building ultra-expensive hypercars, you can’t exactly afford to crash test them the same way as a regular automaker does it.
“It’s really hard to see how the car is slowly being destroyed – hammering it, over-torquing it, and then finally crashing it against a wall… it’s painful, painful to watch,” says Koenigsegg Homologation Manager, David Tugas.
Yet, it has to be done, and done efficiently. Say, for example, that a major automaker needs to perform 16 crash tests for a $25,000 sedan. They can crash 16 cars and lose just $400,000 in the process, whereas for Koenigsegg, 16 cars means a year’s worth of products – and a cost of $30 million. That’s way they devised a clever way to conduct the mandatory crash tests.
“It’s cheaper to rebuild and repair and keep smashing the same car,” explains company founder Christian von Koenigsegg. “That’s of course in a way more difficult because it needs to take multiple hits. But, we designed for that and it saves us both time and money and resources.”
Before actually damaging the real thing, Koenigsegg engineers simulate crash testing the car’s carbon fiber structure on a computer, which they can then correlate with the physical results of the crash test.
According to the Swedish automaker, the Regera’s monocoque structure boasts 65,000 Nm-per-degree of torsional rigidity, whereas a normal car like, for example, a BMW X6 is rated at 29,000 Nm-per-degree, as reported by Apex One.
In the end, it’s important to remember that people don’t just pay millions of dollars for top of the line high-speed runs or straight line acceleration when it comes to hypercars. They also get high levels of passive safety, which is crucial when you’re behind the wheel of something as fast as a Koenigsegg.