Earlier this year, we talked about Koenigsegg's Light Speed Tourbillon Transmission (LSTT). We explored how it couples the 5-liter, 1,500 horsepower (1,119 kW), 1,106 lb-ft (1,500 Nm) of torque, "Hot V8" engine shoed into the rear of the Gemera hypercar and the 850-volt Dark Matter electric motor mounted in the front – but we never got into the specifics of this insane electric powerplant and what makes it so remarkable.

Unveiled in 2023 and stuffed into the Koenigsegg Gemera, the Dark Matter motor created an entirely new league of high-performance electric motor that didn't quite exist before. Most of its details are still hidden away in a secret Koenigsegg vault while awaiting patent protection.

The Dark Matter weighs a mere 86 lb (39 kg) and delivers 800 hp (600 kW) with 922 lb-ft of face-melting torque (1,250 Nm) and a max rev of 8,500 RPM.

The entire unit is about 15.1 inches in diameter and 5.3 inches thick (383.3 mm by 135.5 mm). That's not a typo. It's only slightly bigger than a Roomba by an inch and a half (3.8 cm), but with enough power to send the Roomba into low Earth orbit (not really, but it sure seems like it).

The trick to this ridiculous EV motor is a "little bit" of carbon fiber and a six-phase "raxial flux" design – a fusion of radial and axial flux principles used in electric motors, and a word Koenigsegg coined that didn't even exist in automotive terms before.

The radial flux design isn't just the most common type of EV motor, it's in nearly everything that uses an electric motor. From a drill to an RC car. The shape of the motor is often long with a relatively smallish diameter. The rotor – with its magnetic flux lines pointing outward from the axle – spins inside the housing at high RPM. It's the design you'll find in a Tesla Plaid – Tesla's fastest and most powerful offering. A single Plaid motor makes about half as much horsepower and weighs roughly 20 lb (9 kg) less than the Dark Matter (though the Plaid comes equipped with three of them).

Axial flux, on the other hand, tends to have a much larger diameter, shaped more like a pancake. The magnet forces are parallel to the axle, making them rev slower but produce more torque.

Koenigsegg has incorporated both radial and axial flux into the Dark Matter.

"Mostly axial, with a bit of radial flux," Christian von Koenigsegg told MotorTrend. Meaning that most of the power from Dark Matter is produced with the axial flux aspect of the motor, with the radial part just chipping in a little extra.

You may have read "a little bit of carbon fiber" above, but in reality, nearly the entire motor is made of the material, including its rotor and stator structures. Instead of stacks of laminated steel plates holding everything together as with traditional motor design, Koenigsegg is the first to use carbon fiber structures. Pricey, indeed, but we're talking Koenigsegg here, where its most "economically priced" car, the Gemera, is US$1.7 million.