Koenigsegg is mostly known for its outrageous hypercars with eye-watering price tags and limited production numbers. It is the home of some of the fastest cars in the world, stripping Bugatti of that title a number of times. However, it looks like the Swedish car maker is not impervious to the times we live in and the company just released their first electric drive unit that was developed in-house.
That’s no easy feat as creating a highly efficient electric drive unit is a completely different ordeal to the internal combustion units that Koenigsegg focused on until now. This drive unit uses two electric motors dubbed Quark by the Swedish company. Each Quark electric motor develops 335.5 HP so the total power output of the two combined into one unit, called the Terrier, adds up to 671 HP.
According to Koenigsegg, the Terrier is a torque vectoring electric drive unit that uses a novel torque/power-rich balance between radial (power-dense) and axial (torque-dense) flux topology dubbed Raxial Flux. That’s a lot to take in, but the Swedish car maker says that their new electric drive unit is the most “power/torque dense, torque vectoring drive unit in the EV industry.”
The numbers seem to confirm their claims. That’s because the Terrier unit weighs just 187 pounds and can deliver 671 HP and 811 lb-ft of torque, even though these are just ‘provisional figures’ and they could go up later on. The best news about it though is that Koenigsegg developed this new electric drive unit for various applications and that means we could see it sold to other car makers and made available on cheaper cars than the multi-million dollar ones we usually see come out of Ängelholm.
The first car to get it will be the Gemera. We already knew that the new hypercar from Koenigsegg was going to be a hybrid but no other details about had been offered previously. According to the Electric Motor Design Lead, Dragos-Mihai Postariu, the goal here was to use the electric drive to help boost the Gemera from down low.
“The Quark is designed to bolster the low-speed range of the Gemera, where you need it, for brutal acceleration. The ICE then focuses on the high-speed range. What this means in terms of performance for the Gemera is a big power surge followed by a continuous record-speed push to 248 mph without any torque or power losses,” he said.
