The Perils of Koenigsegg Ownership

Ever since Marcello Gandini designed the Lamborghini Countach’s scissor doors, any serious competitor to the automotive loony throne has had to have a trick door. With the Koenigsegg’s, there’s a slight catch.

It’s not that the Swedes—who have this summer picked up Saab from General Motors—failed to try. The Koenigsegg’s door system, designed by company founder Christian von Koenigsegg, even has a wonderfully pretentious name. Refer to it by anything other than a dihedral synchro-helix actuation system and Mr. von Koenigsegg, pictured above, will pummel you into linguistic submission with a carbon fiber reindeer femur.

Here’s all that dihedral syncro-helix actuation in brief systemic action:

For your big fancy Lamborghini scissor door, opening upwards, danger lurks from above in the form of low-hanging parking garage ceilings and low-flying pelicans. In the case of the Koenigsegg, it’s from curbes, as made explicit by this warning label I photographed on the doorsill of a one-off K’segg built for a Kuwaiti oil millionaire:

Translation: popping open the extending-and-rotating door actuating the dihedral syncho-helix system closer than 16" to a curb at least 4" high is sure to result in a very, very expensive crunch of carbon fiber. Not that you’d care if you were in a position to custom-order Koenigseggs, but it’s a nice touch nevertheless.

I sincerely hope you Koenigsegg-owning readers out there are smarter than to open your Swedish hypercar’s doors with such reckless abandon. If not, post your tales of dihedral doom in the comments.

Photo Credit: ADAM IHSE/AFP/Getty Images and the author

Send an email to Peter Orosz, the author of this post, at peter@jalopnik.com.

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