The Koenigsegg hood release handle Challenge is finished and 70 creative designs have been uploaded to GrabCAD. The winners have been chosen (will be announced Oct 14) and a solution was found thanks to the inventive minds of the GrabCAD engineers. I interviewed Jon Gunner, Technical Director of Koenigsegg, to ask what his thoughts were about the Challenge and his satisfation with the results.
About the Challenge - Swedish super sportscar manufacturer Koenigsegg wanted to redesign their front and rear hood release handles to replace a previous standard which was a not-so-supercar design. Jon was part of the jury and responsible for the Challenge from Koenisegg' side.
Lauri: Why did you choose to organise a Challenge through GrabCAD?
Jon: I liked the concept of GrabCAD and was impressed by the quality of uploaded data on other challenges and in the library.
Lauri: Why did you choose the hood release handle to have designed in the competition?
Jon: The hood release handle is something that has been on my list for improvement for some time and being a nicely self-contained assembly, thought it suited to the challenge concept.
Lauri: What do you think about this approach to redesign something?
Jon: It’s very different to how we normally work, which is a very close coupled process between R&D and the production team, but it is nice to have fresh eyes look at a problem in isolation, which we don’t normally have the possibility to do.
Lauri: Are you satisfied with the results?
Jon: We did not expect to get a solution that would totally fulfil our specification and requirements and unfortunately no entry had completely fulfilled all criteria. So, the results will require some adjustment in house before it can progress to a viable solution for production. However the results were generally of a high quality.
Lauri: What is the level of the results?
Jon: We have had 70 entries, most of which were of a high CAD standard, approximately 10 had thought about all of the requirements and constraints and 3-4 had a sound well developed solutions, from which we picked our winner.
Lauri:What would have been the alternative if you would not have had the Challenge?
Jon: The alternative would have been an in house project, but being low priority, we may have had to wait for a solution.
Lauri: What is the biggest challenge (problem, issue) for you in engineering?
Jon: Being such a small, low-volume, high-quality niche vehicle producer, we struggle to get good cooperation with turnkey suppliers, which actually drives us to develop more in house, creating more efficient streamlined product but loads time and resource pressure on me and my team.
Lauri: How many in-house engineers you have?
Jon: We are five full-time engineers, responsible for the entire vehicle.
Lauri: What will you do with the winning works of the competition now?
Jon: We will do a detailed engineering study and tweak where necessary to ensure it will work as expected and be manufacturable in a process suitable for our low volume to meet our quality aspirations.
A big thank you to Jon for sharing his thoughts about this amazing Challenge. You can see the specification and full details, including entries, on our Koenigsegg Challenge page.
