For me, a daily driver must have at a minimum:
- 4 seats as I have a small family.
- Space for luggage
- A sporty driving experience.
- AWD for better adverse-weather traction and power handling
Lucky for me, the Koenigsegg Gemera has all of these and more. So, could it be my ultimate daily driver?
“Ultimate”
Superlatives are an interesting thing. They are a way of expressing an outlier in a subject; best, highest, most. “This is the most beautiful car” is something you might say about the Lamborghini Miura or a Ferrari 250 GTO. “Ultimate” is one of those words you would use to describe something that cannot be transcended. “There is nothing better than this” or “that.” However, in most use cases, superlatives are subjective. Whatever you’re describing as “best” or “ultimate” can change if your viewpoint changes. My version of Ultimate could be very different from your version of Ultimate.
Even the definition of a daily driver is relatively subjective. What are you ok driving daily? Can you take your race car to the grocery store? Do you need room for a big (or small) family? Do you drive in the rain? In the snow? Are cooled seats a “must-have”? Lots of different questions to be answered to really get a solid answer.
“Mega”
Marketed as Koenigsegg’s first Mega-GT, it has a myriad of features that one would want in a daily driver. Despite only having 2 doors, there is room for 4 full-sized adults in the cabin and 4 carry-on luggage bags. There is also no B-pillar, so the doors are extra large to make room for an opening that allows occupants to enter the car without the front seat moving forward. The doors have “dihedral synchro-helix actuation”, which allows them to rotate up and out of the way rather than out to the side to make parking safe and easy. Once inside, each occupant enjoys their own carbon bucket seat, along with heated and cooled cup holders! That’s a Mega-experience! I personally have a small family (one wife, one child, and one toy-sized dog) so they could easily fit inside one of these beauties.
It’s definitely not lacking in the “sporty driving experience” department, either. There are 3 electric motors: 1 on each rear wheel and 1 on the driveshaft. These make a combined 1100hp, which would be enough for most sporting maneuvers. But Koenigsegg didn’t stop there. A 2.0L twin-turbocharged 3-cylinder engine sits out back that sends another 590hp to the front wheels. That’s a total of almost 1700hp! On top of all that power, if you drive “normally” in hybrid mode, you can get over 600 miles of range! That is quite Mega!
That’s just the tip of the iceberg though. Koenigsegg recently announced they have a new option for even more power: 600 more to be exact! For the low, low price of $400,000, you can upgrade your hybrid drivetrain to include one Dark Matter motor up front and a version of the Jesko twin turbo V8 out back. With the former creating 800hp and the latter pumping out 1500hp, your new combined power totals a loony 2300hp!
Room for the family? Check. Room for luggage? Check. AWD? Check. Sporty experience? Check. So, what’s not to love?
“Regular”
There are a few cons to owning a car of this magnitude. The elephant in the room is the price. Just to get in the door, you’ll need a cool $1.7 million. That doesn’t include options. Replacing the tires is probably the cheapest thing on the car. However, you’ll likely have to find a specialized dealer to do basic maintenance (such as oil and other fluid changes) raises the running cost significantly. Possibly having to ship the car to said dealer adds more cost along with more time involved, meaning less days you’ll get to drive the car during the year. Add insurance to that pile and you can bet that you’d (obviously) need quite the income to support purchasing a car on this level.
Next would be the fact that it would be difficult to do normal activities without them turning into their own event. Never mind the stares you’d get everywhere you went. You’d likely get stopped by car people and non-car people alike. Just grabbing some milk from the grocery store would turn into an event that would double or triple the time it took someone in a more “regular” car. Plus, every time you leave the car in a parking spot, there’s the worry that something will happen to it. While you have those spicy dihedral synchro-helix actuation doors that allow you to take up minimal space, regular cars do not. Imagine coming out to your car with some milk and having a $20,000 dent in your carbon fiber car. I feel that I would worry about the car more often than not and would find it difficult to really daily it much during the year.
And lastly, even with the AWD, I feel it would be difficult to drive in adverse weather. I live in Ohio and it snows there during the winter (another “obviously”). It should drive decently in the snow with the correct tires (if winter tires can be had in the sizes cars like these need). I do not feel it has the ground clearance to handle any encounter with un-shoveled roads, even with the “robotized hydraulically adjustable ride height”. I’m sure if I was able to purchase a car of this magnitude, I would be able to afford another car for those situations. But can you call this a true daily driver in that case?
Ultimate?
All in all, the Koenigsegg Gemera, in either trim, is quite the Mega-GT. It makes more power than I’d probably ever use (probably). It has AWD to help put that power down. Also fits all of my family and even has space for luggage along with that. So, it checks all of my boxes and then some and throws in heaps of cool features on top of that. But I still feel that I wouldn’t be able to drive it daily due to the expense, extra attention, and true all-weather multi-season capability. Is the Gemera the ultimate daily driver? For me, the answer is no. But if I had the money, I’d definitely try to prove me wrong.
