Enlarge / A 3D-printed Czinger brake node that combines the caliper and upright with 40 percent less mass than a conventional assembly. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Polestar provided a flight from Washington DC to London and back, and two nights in a hotel so we could visit its UK R&D center and attend the Goodwood Festival Of Speed. While we were there, we also spoke to Czinger about 3D printing. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing as it's more commonly known, is more a tool for rapid prototyping in the auto industry than manufacturing actual parts to be used on actual cars. Well, mostly. An interesting company working in this space is Divergent 3D, which has already been supplying 3D-printed parts like subframes for low-volume cars for several car companies, including Aston Martin and Mercedes-AMG.

Divergent gave rise to another startup called Czinger, which acts as something of a showcase for Divergent's printing tech, using it to build what it says will be the world's fastest production car. We caught up with company founder Kevin Czinger at this year's Goodwood Festival of Speed, where among other things, we discovered Divergent has diversified its client base and is now getting into aviation, 3D printing wings for the drone maker General Atomics.

We took a look at the Czinger 21C at last year's Monterey Car Week —to quickly recap, it's a tandem-seating hybrid supercar with 1,250 hp (932 kW) and a vast amount of aerodynamic downforce that has allowed it to break production car track records at Laguna Seca and the Circuit of the Americas.

Enlarge / The Rimac Nevera is a $2 million electric hypercar with 1,914 hp (1.4 MW) and 1,725 lb-ft (2,339 Nm). (credit: Rimac)

Move over, Model S; you're no longer the quickest game in town. The electric powertrain specialists at Rimac have taken the Nevera hypercar to a test track in Germany where it set a total of 23 new performance records. Among these, a 0-60 mph time of a mere 1.74 seconds and a standing quarter-mile in just 8.26 seconds. That means the Nevera can even outrun the mighty Model S Plaid , which needs a second more to run the length of a drag strip.

Perhaps the most impressive record is one that few cars, electric or otherwise, are even capable of. It's the 0–400–0 time—hit 400 km/h (249 mph) from a standing start, then brake back down to 0 mph. In 2017, Bugatti set the standard when the Chiron completed this test in 42 seconds.

But that record was snatched away by Koenigsegg, the innovative Swedish hypercar manufacturer, first with an Agera RS with a time of 36.44 seconds, then again to 33.29 seconds, then later to 31.49 seconds using a Regera hypercar.

Enlarge / The Czinger 21C features tandem seating and a 3.5:1 lift-to-drag ratio. (credit: Rolex/Tom O'Neal)

BMW provided flights from DC to San Francisco and back, plus five nights in a hotel, so we could attend Monterey Car Week in August. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

MONTEREY, Calif.—Perhaps the coolest thing I saw at the 2016 Los Angeles Auto Show was a concept car showing off the work of Divergent 3D. The intriguing thing wasn't the concept itself but rather the direct-metal laser sintering technique that Divergent and its founder Kevin Czinger were developing as a much more rapid way to build low-volume vehicles.

Czinger started developing the 3D printers after earlier co-founding an electric vehicle company. "I learned that what slows down advances in the auto industry is hard-metal tooling and stamping," Czinger told me in 2016. "You need hundreds of millions of dollars up front for hardware design and construction, which needs to be amortized, and changes to that hardware become prohibitively expensive."

Sounds cool—did it go anywhere?

All too often, we get a glimpse of a promising new technology and then never hear about it again. Happily, that's not the case here. Fast-forward six years, and not only are Divergent's 3D printers in use at OEMs around the world, but Czinger is using them to create his own vehicles. They were on display at the Quail, an event that's part summer garden party, part car show. It's now a hot spot for the ultra-low-volume, ultra-high-performance side of the car industry.

Enlarge / Making a success of the supercar game is not easy, but Christian von Koenigsegg's company has survived two decades and continues to develop innovative new technology that's years ahead of the competition. Ars talked to him to find out what he's most proud of. (credit: Franco Gutierrez)

BMW provided flights from DC to San Francisco and back, plus five nights in a hotel so we could attend Monterey Car Week. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

It would be mixing ad campaigns if not metaphors to say that Swedes think differently about design, but I think there’s something to it: Saab was famously left field, even down to where it located the ignition switch; Volvo carefully treads its own path with safety foremost in its mind but with crisp modern design. And then there’s Koenigsegg.

Located at a former Swedish fighter base, this company has been ploughing its own furrow through the automotive superlatives: supercars, hypercars, now megacars. But always in its own way—how else to explain a three-cylinder engine with pneumatic actuators instead of camshafts, a V8 with no flywheel, or a transmission with seven clutches that's both nine-speed automatic but also six-speed manual, with clutch pedal no less?

At this year's Monterey Car Week, few are as close to automotive royalty as the company's eponymous founder, Christian von Koenigsegg. The company's stand at one end of The Quail was among the most mobbed throughout the day, as young TikTokkers in their best suits competed for his attention, or maybe just another look at his latest creation, the CC850. Part 50th birthday present to himself, part celebration of the company entering its third decade, it's a new take on Koenigsegg's first offering, the CC8S.

Enlarge / Rimac Automobili brought the Nevera over to the US, allowing us to try out the car on familiar California roads. (credit: Rimac)

The performance benefits of electric powertrains are now well understood. Thanks to near-instantaneous torque delivery and continuous advances in everything from software to motor design, cars like the Tesla Model S Plaid have rewritten the production car hierarchy when it comes to acceleration.

Yet many traditionalists have been slow to come around on electric vehicles, complaining that the driving experience is too clinical and performance is too circumstantial. They say that EVs lack emotion. Well, the Rimac Nevera is about to change all of that.

Rimac may not be a household name today, but over the past decade, the Croatian startup has been hard at work quietly establishing itself as a key player in high-performance EV development. What began in 2010 with a handful of employees in a converted warehouse has expanded into a 1,700-employee operation with a 200,000 m² campus in Kerestinec, Croatia. The site, which is currently under construction, will house the company's research and development centers and production facilities when it opens in 2023. The company's rapid growth has been aided by its various EV development projects for automakers like Porsche , Hyundai, Aston Martin, Pininfarina, and Koenigsegg, leading Rimac to split the company into two distinct entities (Rimac Automobili and Rimac Technology) last year. (Rimac Group also now owns Bugatti, with Porsche .)

Enlarge / The M Hybrid V8 is instantly recognizable as a BMW, as it wears the brand's kidney grille. (credit: BMW)

On Monday, BMW became the first carmaker to reveal its new hybrid racing prototype built to the new LMDh rule set. It's called the BMW M Hybrid V8, and it will race for the first time at next January's Rolex 24 in Daytona.

Sports car racing is in the midst of a transition period as race organizers in the US and Europe adopt new rules for prototype race cars. Because we're talking about sports car racing, and because there are two sets of organizers, it's all a bit complicated.

The 24 Hours of Le Mans is organized by the French Automobile Club de l'Ouest, or ACO. Many of the cars that run in that race also compete in the World Endurance Championship, which is organized by the Federation Internationale de L'Automobile (or FIA). In the US, there's the International Motor Sports Association (IMSA), which runs the WeatherTech championship.