What Is the Koenigsegg Logo?

The company is named after its founder, Christian von Koenigsegg, who started it in 1994 at the age of 22. The von Koenigsegg family is traced to Swabia in the Holy Roman Empire and is attested from 1171. According to Wikipedia, the shield has been the family's coat of arms since the 12th century, when a family member was knighted by the Holy Roman Empire.

The badge takes that shield and its diamond lattice and turns them into a car emblem. The archived 1994 version paints the lattice red and gold on a blue shield. The company has not published a color-by-color meaning, so any reading of the red, gold or blue is interpretation.

Wikipedia credits Jacob Låftman with designing the badge in 1994, the same year the company was founded. That detail comes from one source, and no portrait or further account of him is available in the archive used here. What is clear is that the design is a redraw of old heraldry rather than a newly invented mark.

The 2020 version in the archive keeps the structure of the crest but redraws it as a black-and-white line drawing with a black lattice, and sets the name below without the underline.

Koenigsegg builds its cars on a former Swedish Air Force base near Ängelholm. Its own website says the site was home to a squadron known as the Ghost Squadron, whose planes flew from early morning until dusk, so people often heard them above the clouds without seeing them. When Koenigsegg took over the hangars and runway in the early 2000s, the company says, the squadron's pilots and crew gave it their ghost emblem and asked that it go on every car built at the facility, as it had been on their fighter jets.

Wikipedia tells a slightly different version, saying the company adopted the squadron's ghost symbol as a tribute. Either way, the ghost is not part of the family shield. Koenigsegg says it sits on the rear hood over the engine bay of every car, and calls it the “Spirit of Performance”.