Koenigsegg Gemera: Pound for Pound the Coolest Vehicle at the 2023 New York Auto Show

While we have to show some love to the outgoing Regera, there's something about the vehicle next to it, the Gemera, that oozes cool in a way we think no other car at the Jacob K. Javits Center quite matches this year. This is the Koenigsegg Gemera, the most amazing, awe-inspiring, and coolest vehicle of any variety on display here in New York. With more cool tech on offer per cubic foot of vehicle than anything else in the show, there's so much about the first four-seater Koeiigsegg that makes it a guaranteed future classic.

It's been said in the past that the two most important automotive designers in the business right now are Elon Musk and Christian von Koenigsegg. While Mr. von Koenigsegg himself will tell you how honored he is to be mentioned in the same sentence as Musk. But you see the differences the two men have in their vision of an environmentally sustainable luxury vehicle when you take one good look at the Gemera in the flesh.

You wouldn't expect Elon Musk to allow any sort of internal combustion engine anywhere close to the internals of a Tesla. At least, without Rich Benoit doing the swap himself, of course. But not just any old ICE unit finds its way under the hood of the Gemera. In fact, there's almost nothing about the Gemera's construction that's traditional or common practice whatsoever. Of course, you could buy a whole fleet of Model S Plaids for the price of just one Gemera.

But do you really get 17 times the car for roughly 17 times the price? Well, that's a pretty tough question to answer, as there are only going to be around 300 of these novel four-seat coupes manufactured. As it sits at the Jacob K. Javits Center in Manhattan, this Gemera is as it will be when the car starts production in 2024 as opposed to just a prototype. With that in mind, we have no qualms about deep diving to see what's what.

With the Gemera's Dihedral Synchro-Helix twin doors, it's almost easy to get the impression it's a mere entry-level Koenigsegg. A softer, less aggressive introductory course in the world of hypercars gone all sensible and Swedish. But that'd be totally false. When these special doors of Christian von Koenigsegg's own design swing open, you're introduced to an interior, unlike anything you've ever seen before.

At the end of each door's 90 degrees of travel, the Gemera's novel full-sized rear seats reveal themselves. Showing a space that gives the front driver and passengers enough space to feel like they're still in a low-slung hypercar while also giving adults enough room to sit behind them. Each occupant inside a Gemera is treated to proverbial seas of plush-looking yellow leather with a funky diamond pattern accent across each interior door card.

Couple that with the acres of visible carbon fiber and crisp 13-inch central displays front and rear. Gemera is one of the most special and unique places to sit inside in the modern auto sector. The twin cameras and screens for the driver and passenger side wing mirror certainly explain with the exterior mirrors are so small. It's perhaps the single negative point most would point to if asked to point them out.

What isn't a negative even slightly is the level of tech that goes into every nut and bolt underneath the Gemera's lightweight skin. With three electric motors on tap, one on the crankshaft and the other two engaging a rear wheel each, it's all in support of a 1.98-liter, twin-turbocharged three-cylinder engine that forgoes a traditional camshaft in favor of electromagnetically operated poppet valves.

All this borderline sci-fi engineering means this little three-pot cranks out 590 horsepower (600 ps) all by itself. In conjunction with the plug-in hybrid drive, the Gemera jets a scarcely believable 1,700 horsepower (1,724 ps). For some comparison, the Rolls-Royce Merlin 45 engine, famous in the Supermarine Spitfire Mk V of World War II legend, could only muster 1,500 horsepower. To drive that point home, Koenigsegg estimates the Gemera's top speed is only 120 or so mph slower than that of the above-mentioned Spitfire.

Koenigsegg has given an exact number of 249 mph (400 kph) as the Gemera's top speed. If true, that would make the Gemera the fastest four-seater, bone-stock production car ever manufactured by a country mile. With a starting MSRP of $1.7 million, it's safe to say the cheapest new Koenigsegg money can buy is just as special as all the rest of them. If you ask us, it's even more special.