As a part of the ongoing Monterey car week in California, USA, Koenigsegg has unveiled its latest ‘megacar’, the CC850. If you know the past cars of the Swedish brand, you’ll notice that the Koenigsegg CC850 has a very familiar design, and that is because it was designed to pay homage to Koenigsegg's very first car - the CC8S - on its 20th anniversary. The CC8S put Koenigsegg on the map, but the objective of the CC850 is somewhat different.
The Koenigsegg CC850 pays homage to the CC8S on its 20th Anniversary.
This car was not developed to break the Koenigsegg Jesko's outright track times or acceleration figures, but it was developed “to offer the highest level of driver satisfaction and enjoyment with the exhilarating performance for which Koenigsegg is renowned”. The car was also unveiled on Koenigsegg's founder - Christian von Koenigsegg's 50th birthday, and hence the ‘50’ suffix to the CC8 name. Additionally, only 50 units of the car will be made, with the first one going to Christian himself.
Only 50 units of the Koenigsegg CC850 will be made.
Don't mistake the car's old timer design and the company's statement that the car won't break records to mean that the car isn't extremely fast though. While Koenigsegg is yet to reveal the performance figures of the car, it has the same 5.0-litre twin-turbo V8 which powers the Jesko, albeit in a different state of tune. The output of the engine is tuned to match the car's 1,385 kg kerb weight, and with 1,385 hp (1,366 bhp) & 1,385 Nm torque on offer, the car achieves the same 1:1 power to weight ratio which the iconic Koenigsegg One:1 originally did, and it has almost twice the power & torque than the CC8S. This power output is when the car is running on E85 fuel, and running on normal petrol, it will put out only 1185 bhp.
The Koenigsegg CC850 gets a very unmistakably Koenigsegg silhouette, and also gets telephone-dial style wheels.
We could go on and on about the technology that this Koenigsegg packs to a point where you might not understand anything anymore, but lets take a look at the car's design first. The car has an unmistakably Koenigsegg silhouette, with its overall looks borrowed from the CC8S, but the design looks fresh even today, highlighting how timeless the design of the original Koenigsegg was. The car also gets telephone-dial style rims (which the young readers amongst us might not relate to), but it gets modern touches too, like a retractable rear wing. The car gets a very minimal aero profile with only a tiny lip spoiler at the front, but most of the aero trickery is happening underneath the car, as is evident with the big diffuser at the back.
The CC850 gets a minimal aero profile with a retractable rear wing, & most of the aero trickery is happening underneath the car.
To support CC850's aim of offering the highest level of driver satisfaction, it gets a gated six-speed manual transmission with a proper clutch. But there's more! It also gets a 9-speed automatic gearbox. And all of that in the same car! How? Let me explain. Underneath the skin, the car essentially has a 9-speed automatic gearbox which is based on Koenigsegg's highly sophisticated 'Light Speed Shift' (LSS) transmission. This is paired with an ‘Engage Shift System’ (ESS), which allows you to operate the gearbox manually.
The CC850 gets a 6-speed manual gearbox with a clutch, which is underpinned by a 9-speed automatic multi-clutch gearbox.
The car gets three driving modes - normal, wet, & track - and depending on what mode is selected, the ESS selects six gear ratios to be operated manually from the nine on offer. This means that the manual gearing of the car will actually be different when you switch modes, how cool is that? Well, Koenigsegg sure does know its cool, and it has given this car a cool nickname too - TWMPAFMPC - or, “The Worlds Most Powerful And Fastest Manual Production Car”. And if operating this manual gearbox is too tedious a task for the 49 future owners of the CC850, the gearbox can be engaged into an automatic mode, where the car's computers take over the operations of the 9-speed multi-clutch Light Speed Shift gearbox. The CC850's 5.0-litre V8 also makes do without a flywheel, and according to Koenigsegg, it is “therefore the most responsive, fast- revving engine possible”, and has a redline at 8,500 rpm.
Koenigsegg is yet to release more details of this megacar, and we sure are waiting on the edge of our seats to know more about it. The launch date or pricing of the car is unknown too, and with only 50 units to be made, it is likely that all of them may have already found their buyers by now.
