As competitive as the auto industry is, you can always count on it being extraordinarily petty at times. Case in point: Koenigsegg, the sometimes benevolent Swedish supercar brand, has just posted a photo of the Agera RS on its Facebook page, seemingly mocking the Bugatti Chiron’s recent 0-400-0 km/h (0-248-0 mph) record with a message that read: “0-400-OMG.”
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what Koenigsegg’s implying with the message. Apparently, the Chiron’s ability to travel from 0 to 400 km/h and back to 0 km/h in 41.96 seconds - a world record, by the way - isn’t fast enough. Koenigsegg didn’t elaborate any further on the meaning of the message beyond saying “coming soon!” That part is interesting because it’s understood that Koenigsegg’s thinly-veiled message aimed at Bugatti could be a precursor for something extraordinary, possibly an attempt by the Agera RS to beat the Chiron’s record, if it hasn’t done it already. The Koenigsegg supercar certainly has the credentials to pull it off, especially if it’s equipped with the One:1 upgrade package that brings its output up to 1,360 horsepower and 1,011 pound-feet of torque. So, can the Koenigsegg Agera RS beat the Bugatti Chiron’s “stop-blast off-stop again” record? We can only know if Koenigsegg shows us, which we’re now expecting to see sooner than later.
Continue after the jump to read the full story.
Stay tuned; we’re going to hear more about this rivalry
When Bugatti and Juan Pablo Montoya set the 0-400-0 km/h record with the Chiron, it seemed like an inevitability that a rival would respond in some meaningful way. It certainly didn’t take long for Koenigsegg to do just that.
This is what life is like in the supercar segment, folks. Every little achievement one car makes will come down to another car trying to one-up it. We’ve seen Koenigsegg and Bugatti embroiled in this kind of struggle in the past, so it’s not really a new take to see both brands are at each other’s throats again, figuratively speaking of course.
So here’s the deal: it looks like the Bugatti Chiron’s record is on borrowed time, or at least that’s what Koenigsegg is trying to hint at. We can speculate about this all we want but, at the end of the day, it’s on the Swedish automaker to prove that the Agera RS is, in fact, faster to 0-400-0 than the Bugatti Chiron. It looks that way judging from Koenigsegg’s post, so now we wait to see if there’s really some truth to the “0-400-OMG” mockery.
References
Koenigsegg Agera RS
Read our full review on the 2015 Koenigsegg Agera RS.
Read our full review on the 2018 Bugatti Chiron.