Check out Koenigsegg’s super lightweight electric motor

Nerdy engineering alert – Koenigsegg has unveiled more details of its first ever electric motor and a tightly packaged EV drive unit, and of course they’re both properly clever indeed.

Let’s start with the motor. Koenigsegg calls it Quark and three of the things are deployed in the bonkers 1,700bhp four-seat Gemera, but it’ll also be sold to anyone who wants to stump up the cash. Koenigsegg mentions aerospace, drone and marine applications as possibilities, but strangely makes no mention of early Vauxhall Novas.

The Quark weighs just 28.5kg and uses “a novel torque/power-rich balance between radial (power-dense) and axial (torque-dense) flux topology dubbed Raxial Flux”. Bit clever for us, that. Anyway, the end result is up to 335bhp and 443lb ft of torque – which Koenigsegg says is “the best torque to power to weight ratio in the industry”.

And then there’s the full torque vectoring drive unit. That’s the chunkier setup you see above (apparently the drinks cans are there for scale). It essentially combines two Quark motors with one of Koenigsegg’s excellently-named David inverters and planetary gear sets. It’s called the Terrier and again is ridiculously lightweight for the power it creates – think 85kg, 670bhp and 811lb ft of torque. An equivalent V8 would be at least double that. 

Could slot in perfectly to that old SRi you've got rotting away, surely...