First steps

In 1993, Christian von Koenigsegg went off in search of a designer for his first car. Now, at this stage, Christian had still never designed a car professionally, (just sketches on his computer and some of his childhood drawings) but he had a philosophy that it must be a natural shape and very efficient in performance. For this reason, he approached Mr. David Crafoord, who was the design director at the Swedish design consultancy ErgonomiDesign. He’s passionate – in a cool, Scandinavian way – about medical innovation. His work has him brainstorming on what he terms as “innovations” for companies like 3M® and Johnson & Johnson®. The two met in Mr. Crafoord’s office and Christian explained him about setting up his own car company with his father and on a tight budget.

After much work and research, Mr. Crafoord was able to create an enticing business plan to acquire the financing. This had to be made feasible for Christian and his father as they were on very restricted resources and a very tight budget. Above all this there was a catch: Mr. Crafoord had never designed a car. So, he decided to get feedback from Christian on the design language for his car. They started looking into the history as what cars were successful in terms of design - Ford GT40®, Citroën DS®, LeMans race cars from the 1980s and, of course, Ferrari®. But Christian wanted his car to be as far different from Ferrari®… a brand that had it’s own niche.          

The key points he pointed were that the car must be well built as at the time in the 90’s, Ferrari®s were built asymmetrically with poor reliability and quality and were expensive to maintain. Christian von Koenigsegg wanted to offer all of that without negating the beauty element. However, up and until this point Christian had no idea about the competition he was up against and with such a small budget there was no way a Swedish start up car company would get their hands on the competition. They visited a Ferrari® dealer in Stockholm and asked the people there if they can look at the ‘Honda NSX’… clearly they weren’t pleased nor friendly with them as Mr. Crafoord recalled in one of his interviews.

Photo credit: Christian von Koenigsegg

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