A while back Porsche, Mclaren and Ferrari decided to build a few hybrids. Almost all of which, produced power around the 1000bhp mark, were spectacular off the line, and most importantly abolished a stereotype about people who drive hybrids. Something about their wrists, I forget. Then the Geneva Motor show happened and the world got the most powerful production car ever, the Bugatti Chiron making an unbelievable 1500bhp. The very next day, somehow that title was stolen. The car in question was built by a Swede, who spent a large portion of his life repairing mopeds and cleaning cars for a living. The Koenigsegg Regera is now both; the world’s most powerful production car and a hybrid. Incidentally it also doesn’t have a gearbox, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Now it all starts with your standard big ol’ five litre V8 motor. Fettle with it. Twin charge it. End up with an engine that makes 1085bhp at 7800 rpm. Add to that; three electric motors. Two on the rear wheels and one on the crank. The three electric motors then make about 700bhp and 560Nm of torque. That’s about the same torque that you get on a diesel 7-series. And that’s just the electric motors. In totality those numbers come to an astonishing 1782bhp and 2000Nm of torque, but that is still not what makes the Regera really special though. That’s right it doesn’t really matter that the Regera make 1782 horsepower. What really matters though is how that power makes its way to the wheels.
Every car in the world, literally every car ever built has a gearbox, whether it’s regular manual gearbox or a CVT or DCT or a sequential shifter like on Formula One cars. As it would turn out, the Swedes don’t believe in any of this, the Koenigsegg Regera has none of it. It has something that they call the Koenigsegg direct drive. Now there is a fair bit of doodadery and Swedish forest magic that comes into play when you hit the throttle. But to keep it simple here’s what happens; when the car starts moving the 700 bhp electric motors power the rear wheels. In the mean while the petrol motor is running to keep the batteries charged. They keep that up till about 30kmph, where hydraulic coupling kicks in, the drive shaft then hooks up straight to the crank. At about this time, the Koenigsegg turns into history’s most powerful vaccum cleaner and sucks the horizon towards itself.
To put that in numbers 0-100 is dispatched in about 2.7 seconds, Koenigsegg insist that this could be much quicker, but is limited by the traction control system, which simply cannot generate the correct torque displacement algorithim in time. The insanity actually gets worse on the trot, 0-300 kmph takes 12 seconds, while 0-400 kmph is despatched in under 20 seconds. 150 kmph to 250 takes 3.2sec. To put in simpler terms by the time you would have finished reading this paragraph, if you were in a rampant Regera you’d be travelling at 400kmph!! And all this could be yours for the paltry sum of 11 Crores, plus taxes. That’s really not a lot when you think about what you get.