If you’ve ever been told in life that you can’t do something, or that your idea is not good enough, or that it will ‘never work’, then you may have a certain affinity with Koenigsegg inventor Christian von Koenigsegg.
Christians is a real-life story of true grit. Like many young men, Christian was fascinated by machinery as a boy. He even went so far as to dream about creating his perfect sports car. In stark contrast to the rest of us, however, Christian actually went ahead and turned that dream into reality – at just 22 years of age.
CvK Sällström Photography LR
With extraordinary determination and vision, Christian explored the limits of both technology and innovation to create the Supercar of his dreams – the Koenigsegg CC. The Koenigsegg CC was the manifestation of a dream and its successful completion gave Christian the courage to continue, and to share his quest for perfection with others. Thus, the car company that bears his name was born.
The story of Koenigsegg is as fascinating and unique as the cars themselves. Christian was only 5 years old when he first saw a stop-motion film from Norway about a bicycle repairman who builds his own racing car. The film must have made an impression, as a young Christian grew up dreaming of creating the perfect sports car. Some 17 years later, and against all odds, he did just that.
Ahead of his time
As a young boy, he dismantled video recorders and toasters, just to see how they worked and whether they could be improved. As a teenager, he was known as the best moped tuner in town and in the early 1990’s, around his 18th birthday, Christian began to work more seriously with technical innovation and came up with some interesting ideas. One of the innovations was called the Chip Player. He believed that one day, computer memory chips would be able to store an entire CD’s worth of data and that it would probably be a cheaper way to buy and store music. He conducted some patent searches for a musical device that would play chips instead of discs. In the end, however, no one seemed interested in the idea, so Christian moved on, not realising that a few years later his idea would become the norm!
Early days
In 1991, he invented a new solution for joining floor planks together without adhesive or nails. He called it Click, as the profile enabled the planks to simply click together. Christian presented this technology to his father-in-law in Belgium, who ran a flooring factory. He rejected the idea, saying that if it was viable, someone would have come up with it a long time ago. Christian then showed the concept to a few other floor manufacturers who also dismissed it. In 1995, a Belgian and a Swedish company patented the exact same solution as Christian’s Click floor – they even called it Click! This innovation has now turned into a multi-billion dollar industry…
Today
Like most innovators, Christian is very busy working on new ideas. For the last 13 years, Christian has worked with the development of Freevalves, that removes the camshafts from the combustion engine and gives total freedom to valve operation. Christian has been involved in the internal development of the valve actuator, the control strategies and actuator layout and packaging on top of developing the business end.
Freevalve – http://koenigsegg.com/christian-von-koenigsegg/
Today, Koenigsegg has an impressive range of supercars in its portfolio. The latest Agera RS will be handcrafted in only 25 examples, with 10 pre-sold prior to the first showing.
Koenigsegg Agera RS Geneva 2017