Koenigsegg makes its first appearance on our list with the CCXR Trevita, and it does so as the most expensive street-legal production car in the world. Why so much coin? With no exaggeration, the car is literally coated in diamonds … and diamonds aren’t cheap.
For the Trevita, the Swedish manufacturer developed a new exterior finish called the Koenigsegg Proprietary Diamond Weave, which involves coating carbon fibers with a diamond dust-impregnated resin. We can’t even fathom how much the touch-up paint costs.
Underneath the lustrous finish lies a 4.8-liter, dual-supercharged V8 with a total output of 1,004 horsepower and 797 pound-feet of torque, which means it should have little to no trouble overtaking semis on the freeway. The car’s specifications — in both performance and price — are nearly comical at this point, and just three were ever made.
The company was founded in 1994 in Sweden by Christian von Koenigsegg, with the intention of producing a "world-class" supercar. Many years of development and prototyping led to the company's first street-legal production car delivery in 2002.
In 2006 Koenigsegg began production of the CCX, which uses an engine created in-house especially for that vehicle. The CCX is street-legal in most countries, including the United States.
In March 2009 the Koenigsegg CCXR was chosen by Forbes to be one of the most beautiful cars in history.
In December 2010 the Koenigsegg Agera won the BBC Top Gear Hypercar of the Year Award.
Apart from developing, manufacturing and selling the Koenigsegg line of supercars, Koenigsegg is also involved in "green technology" development programmes beginning with the CCXR ("Flower Power") flex-fuel supercar and continuing through the present with the Agera R. Koenigsegg is also active in development programs of plug-in electric cars' systems and next-generation reciprocating engine technologies. Koenigsegg also is working[when?] on a camless piston engine for the Regera.
Koenigsegg develops and produces most of the main systems, subsystems and components needed for their cars in-house instead of relying on subcontractors. At the end of 2015 Koenigsegg had 97 employees, with an engineering department of 25 engineers, personally led by Christian von Koenigsegg.