Koenigsegg: four-door coming, but no SUV

A Koenigsegg SUV. Can you imagine? Company boss Christian von Koenigsegg can technically imagine it, though if the idea of such a ‘wild’ SUV delights you, better look away now.

Speaking to TopGear.com at the Geneva Motor Show, he noted that while it was possible to turn his supercar chassis into one that could accommodate an SUV, he’d rather, um, not.

“To make our carbon chassis into an SUV, you’d have to stretch that chassis,” he told us. “You’d keep the front and rear ends as they are, go more extreme on the thickness of the honeycomb, you’d put a carbon cage structure up top… technically I don’t see a big issue with it. 

“It’d be a pretty wild SUV because you’d have a big tunnel in the centre, huge sills, bucket seats. I think it could be a thing the market could accept. But I’m just not a fan of SUVs. To me they are fundamentally flawed. Sure we could sell them, but I don’t want to,” he added.

So there you have it. No Koenigsegg SUV. And isn’t there a little part of you that’s happy about that? While there won’t be an SUV, there will be a four-door Koenigsegg in the near future (as we first told you about last year). “That’s very much on the drawing board,” Christian told TG. “It’s a project we’ve been working on for quite some time. I’d be surprised if that’s the next thing we release – because we’re getting such a good response for our traditional type of supercars – but it’s a car I’d love to do.”

It follows news that the Agera is now entering the final phase of its life – the complete model run of 25 Agera RS cars has been accounted for, and three final Agera editions have been released. Then there’s the small matter of the newly revealed, production version of the Regera: a 1,500bhp, single-drive hypercar.

It uses electric motors in the powertrain, and Christian admits that in the future, an all-electric Koenigsegg could appear too. “In the long term, yes,” he said. “But to get up to our kind of power levels and performance expectations, we would have to have a battery pack weighing over 800kg. That will change over the coming years. But as the batteries get lighter, you can then have a super lightweight combustion engine, and combine the two with no weight penalty.

“So it really depends on what’s the most exciting at the time,” he said.

For the time being, Christian’s quite happy with the 1,500bhp Regera, even if he could see a potentially harder version emerge in the future. “For sure it’s not the limit [of the Regera’s power potential], but with only two-wheel-drive, do we want more? It’s plenty.

“We’ll see what comes after though. I think it could look nice – something like an RS for Regera – but not now,” he added. Consider this, too: this ‘detuned’ production Regera still boasts more power than the new Bugatti Chiron, a car Christian admires.

“It’s maybe a smaller step than I first thought from the Veyron – you can see a lot of the Veyron’s DNA – which is not a bad thing I guess,” he told us. “But they know what they’re doing. It’ll do a good job, and we’re happy to see who can reach 400kmh (249mph) the fastest…”

Hear that? That’s the sound of a very fat gauntlet being thrown down. It’s game on in the hypercar world. Pick your side...