Well isn’t this a surprising development; it seems the Christian von Koenigsegg doesn’t care about the top speeds of his company’s cars. Seems like an odd thing to say when you claim that you have car capable of more than 270 mph. Recently over on the Koenigsegg company blog, CvK himself decided to do an “Ask me Anything” post where he answered questions from fans around the world. Of course, one of the very first questions was about testing the top speed of their cars. Christian’s response was insightful and interesting, and it shares a lot about the company’s focus. In short, they couldn’t care about top speed, as long as the car can produce amazing lap times and please customers.
When it comes down to it, Christian feels that customers would rather have a car that will utterly thrill them on a race track over having a car that will go really fast, eventually, if you can find enough space. Sounds like a nice shot across the bow of Bugatti if you ask me. Then there is the issue of actually testing that top speed. There are very few places in the world that you can stretch a car out to speeds like 250 mph and beyond. The best location in the world to do that is owned by Volkswagen, and you can bet that the brass over at VW wont hand their track over to anyone who could take the title of “world’s Fastest” from the Bugatti Veyron.
I hear you screaming at your monitor, “But what about the salt flats!” Well the problems with the salt flats is that they are salt flats, and not paved. While these areas are great for world record speed run cars, they don’t lend themselves well to seeing exactly how fast a car will go. You see, the surface of a salt flat isn’t solid, so you can’t get full grip and traction. That means that you can’t actually reach the same speed you could on pavement.
So there you have it. While testing its claim of 270 mph+ would be great, Koenigsegg will focus on smashing acceleration and track records. After all, you can experience that every time you are in the car. If you are interested in more info, you can read the full answer from Christian in its entirety below our gallery.
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CJ
Hi Mr. Koenigsegg! I’m a huge fan of Koenigsegg supercars. My question is, when will you guys test the real top speed of your cars?
CvK: We would like to do such a test, but I have to say it’s not a super-high priority for us. It’s nice to be able to say you’ve got the fastest driven road car in the world and we believe that the One:1 could take the current record but for us, it’s a matter of priorities. There are several factors here:
#1 – This is not an easy thing for us to do and it’s not without risk (see below) so……. How important is it, really? Is it important enough to our customers to make us want to do it? Our customers are generally far more interested in, driving excitement, usability and overall performance than outright top speed that is impossible to reach unless one has access to a closed of 10 km straight!. They know that the car is brutally fast and they know that it will do what we say it can do. So the question becomes – is testing the extreme outer limit of the car a necessity, or just good for marketing?
#2 – You have to have the right venue to do it. VW’s Ehra-Lessien test track would be ideal, but they are not likely to allow a Bugatti competitor to use it. So far we have not found any airfield in the world long enough, the longest we found was around 5 km and this is about half the distance needed.
#3 – We are still a small company and we have to choose with what we spend our time and resources on. As we have not found an available track that is good or long enough yet we have prioritized our resources towards track, handling and everyday capability of our cars, which we feel is more important for our cars and customers.
Here’s a question for you – What is more important: an absolute top speed that customers are never likely to reach, or acceleration speed, which a customer will use every time they go to the track?
We recently ran the One:1 from 0-300-0kph in just 17.95 seconds, which is an incredible time. It’s a 0-300kph time far quicker than any other car. We believe the One:1 can go on to reach in excess of the current 435kph record, but we think a ‘usable’ record is much more important. A lot of stars would have to be in alignment for us to attempt this. You never say never. It may come about that we can do this test safely and effectively and we’ll happily make an attempt. But a lot of things have to fall into place for a test like this to be done.
