The weird Koenigsegg energy drink is there for scale, but it really illustrates just how compact the Terrier is.
KoenigseggMost people think of Koenigsegg as a hypercar company, which it is, but more importantly, it’s also a technology company. What I mean by that is that it uses its hypercar platforms to develop new automotive technologies, which it then licenses to other manufacturers. The Terrier electric drive unit, announced on Monday, is the latest technological terror to come out of the company’s Swedish airbase HQ.
In addition to being one of the best single-season TV shows ever, Terriers are known for being small, tenacious and extremely energetic. Those descriptors seem to all apply to this new electric drive unit. The heart of the Terrier unit is the Quark electric motor, also developed by Koenigsegg, which uses a new motor design that the company calls Radial Flux.
The Quark motor uses Koenigsegg’s hollow carbon fiber technology for its rotor, which helps to keep weight superlow. In fact, the company says it weighs just 66 pounds per production-ready motor. Even more remarkable is what Koenigsegg gives as the Quark’s output, 335 horsepower and 443 pound-feet of torque.
The Terrier unit pairs two Quark motors with a six-phase power inverter which keeps the entire package small, even though it allows for things like actual torque vectoring, and Koenigsegg says it’s the most power and torque-dense torque-vectoring drive unit in the world.
Koenigsegg is using the Terrier drive unit in the Gemera hypercar, but just maybe, some enterprising auto manufacturer will take advantage of Koenigsegg’s hard work and license the tech, which should go a ways toward making electric cars lighter and even more powerful.
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