The tiny hypercar maker that nearly bought Saab from General Motors
In 2008 Koenigsegg had 45 staff and built 18 cars. Saab employed 3,400 people and made more than 93,000. Yet in June 2009 General Motors chose the little Swedish hypercar maker as Saab's buyer, backed by US$600 million in financing guaranteed by the Swedish government, before Koenigsegg walked away that November.
Christian von Koenigsegg dreamed up his company after watching The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix, a Norwegian stop-motion film, as a boy. At 22 he raised 60 million kronor from investors and founded the firm in 1994, aiming to build a world-class sports car. The first prototype was finished in 1996, but engine deals kept collapsing, first an Audi V8 and then a flat-12 once raced in Formula One under the Subaru badge. The first street-legal production model, the CC8S, finally arrived in 2002.
A fire badly damaged one of its buildings in February 2003, so the company moved into an abandoned air force base near Ängelholm, converting a fighter-jet hangar into a factory. It still uses the old military runway for high-speed testing, and its cars carry the ghost symbol once painted on the squadron's planes, alongside a badge based on the von Koenigsegg family coat of arms.
What sets the firm apart is how much it builds itself. Unusually for such a small maker, it develops its own engines, transmissions, control systems and software rather than buying from suppliers. That has produced innovations such as the Freevalve camless engine, first used in the four-seat Gemera, and the Light Speed Transmission. In 2017 the Agera RS set a two-way average top speed of 447 kilometres an hour.
The Saab adventure ended because of uncertainty over when the takeover could be completed, according to the company. Later, in 2019, it sold a 20 percent stake to National Electric Vehicle Sweden for US$171 million, then bought it back in 2021. A new factory opened in 2023, doubling its production capacity.
Source: Koenigsegg
