All of the cars, concepts, and wild ideas from the 2019 Geneva Motor Show

It takes a lot for a petrol-fueled car to nudge out all of the hyper electrics that attract eyeballs at the Geneva Motor Show, but Koenigsegg has done it. The new Jesko by Koenigsegg, named after the company founder’s father, is claimed to be the world’s first road-legal 300 mph car. That top speed translates to more than 480 kilometers per hour. To put it in more relatable terms, this car can travel fast enough to cover the length of a football field — doesn’t matter which version of football you prefer — in less than a second. When you think of it in those terms, you’ll probably also realize just how theoretical performance like that is: there aren’t many straight lines in the world long enough to let a person hit such ludicrous speeds.

Koenigsegg is producing only 125 units of the Jesko, with a choice between the so-called top speed version that achieves the headline-grabbing 300 mph and a more track-oriented variant, the latter of which is on show in Geneva this week. Despite a mind-melting $2.8 million starting price before tax, 90 of the cars had already been pre-sold before the Jesko’s official unveiling, and Koenigsegg’s been doing brisk business during the show, with expectations that the company will leave Switzerland with all its Jesko orders filled.

Dune buggies, according to Volkswagen and some senior Verge staff members, used to be hip. I’m told that young people used to once go driving on California beaches instead of worrying about crippling student loan debt, uncertain job prospects, and unaffordable homes. Hoping to revive the spirit, if not the economics, of the past in a modern all-electric form, Volkswagen has come to the Geneva Motor Show 2019 with a new ID Buggy concept car. Like the ID Vizzion from last year, the Buggy is huge — it has the proportions of a smaller car, but the absolute dimensions of something approaching an SUV — and all the VW logos are lit up with LEDs.

Other than its sheer size, this VW Buggy also catches the eye with a cheery matte-green paint job, exposed wheels with off-road tires, open side skirts, and, of course, the complete lack of any doors or roof. I can’t say that the touch controls on the steering wheel make a great deal of sense in the context of a dirt-loving, dune-raiding buggy, but I’ve seen sillier things crammed into concept cars this week at Geneva.

The biggest debuts each year at the Geneva Motor Show are usually eye-popping supercars, but look hard enough and you can find some more... democratic ideas in the margins. Like Fiat’s newest concept, the Centoventi, which is a customizable modular electric car that totally rethinks many of the norms of automotive ownership.

The Centoventi — named as such in honor of the Italian automaker’s 120th anniversary — is an exploration of what it would be like to buy a very plain car that you can dress up to your liking. Customers would buy a metal gray car (loosely based on the company’s Panda lineup), but would be able to choose from four different roofs, four bumpers, four wheel covers, and four paint wraps. The roof choices, for example, include a soft top option or a solar panel to help power the in-car electronics — including a digital display on the rear bumper.

Ralph Kluge, head of Kia’s interior design team, thinks EVs up until now have been too logical, appealing to customers’ reason instead of their emotion. So, in a deliberate move to troll the Geneva Motor Show — or “to polarize a little bit,” as Kluge puts it — Kia has unveiled its Imagine concept car. Its absolute highlight is an array of 21 smartphone-sized LCDs that form the dashboard / instrument cluster for the driver. They don’t do a damn thing for the passenger, other than look like a deliberately distorted mess.

Maybe I’m supposed to be turned off by the sheer lunacy of what Kia’s brought to Geneva, but I actually like it. There’s a total clash between the gentle wave-like arrangement of the screens and the jagged, zigzaggy sharpness of their corners. It creates a busier visual than any functional information display should ever aspire to, but, again, I’m enjoying the uniqueness of the whole thing. We need concept designers to explore further than merely deciding between variants of rounded-off parallelograms, and I applaud Kia for letting go of any sensible restraints. “We took our liberties with this one,” Kluge admits.

Hypercars are like big cities: more glamorous from a distance, rarely affordable to people who earn an honest living, and often claustrophobically limited in interior space. The Geneva Motor Show is full of them every year, but in 2019, Pininfarina has delivered an exception with its 1,900-horsepower, all-electric Battista. This is one of the few cars where I find myself wanting it more after I’ve seen it in person rather than before. Not that it matters what I want with such an exclusive performance and hype beast, of which there’ll only ever be 150 made, and each will cost a dizzying $2.6 million.

Pininfarina design director Luca Borgogno says of the Battista: “We wanted Battista to be very Italian, with sensual curves to give back a feeling of the cars of the ’60s and the moment in time when sensual design in cars was to the fore and when Pininfarina really became iconic. The body form speaks this Italian language.” I can’t converse in Italian to save my life, but the Battista’s flowing curves definitely speak to me.

In among the ornate (Aston Martin’s new Lagonda concept) and the obscene (Bugatti’s one-off La Voiture Noire), Volvo spin-off brand Polestar is gracing the Geneva Motor Show 2019 with a car that merits attention for its relevance as well as it looks. The Polestar 2 is a five-door, all-electric fastback coupe that carries over much of the sporty styling of the turbocharged Polestar 1, however it drops the price dramatically while adding the distinction of being the first car to feature a native implementation of Google’s Android Auto. What I saw of both in Geneva this week left me with a very positive impression.

Looking at the Polestar 2 from the outside, there’s little evidence of the pricing delta that exists between it and the supercar-rivaling Polestar 1. The 1 costs 155,000, whether in euros or dollars, while the Polestar 2’s launch model is €59,900, to be followed by lower-tier variants that drop down as low as €40,000 (roughly $45,000, with taxes included). But the looks and attention to detail in the design are high-class in both Polestar models. The Polestar 2 looks and feels like a luxury vehicle, and given its starting price, that’s to be reasonably expected.

After months of teasing, Italian automotive design-outfit-turned-manufacturer Pininfarina has revealed its first car, the Battista. It’s a sleek $2.6 million hypercar with power that lives up to its brawny-sounding name, and it’s sure to blow nearly any other car in the world off the asphalt, all without using a drop of gas. Just 150 will be made.

Pininfarina says the Battista is “the most powerful road-legal car ever designed and built in Italy.” Considering Italy is the country that birthed the two companies most people associate with supercars, it’s hard to think of a more obvious “shots fired” statement.

Electric car startup Piëch Automotive, named for legendary Volkswagen executive (and grandson of the founder of Porsche) Ferdinand Piëch, arrived at the Geneva Motor Show this week with an electric supercar and an interesting story to tell. According to the company, the all-electric Mark Zero is powered by a new type of battery that will recharge to 80 percent in less than five minutes. If true, that represents a pretty incredible breakthrough in battery technology. But until we see some independent proof of this, we’ll reserve judgment.

Here’s how Piëch, which was co-founded by Ferdinand Piëch’s son Anton “Toni” Piëch along with Rea Stark Rajcic, describes its new battery tech:

Disregard your bank (im)balance for a moment, and consider this proposition: Bugatti has designed a one-off, blacked-out car — built upon the Chiron drivetrain, and made out of carbon fiber and all the finest materials humanity has discovered — but it costs a whopping $18.9 million and you can’t have it for another 2.5 years, because Bugatti has to figure out how to engineer and homologate the preposterous thing. Do you take up that offer?

Any car fanatic would calculate how many Ferraris, McLarens, and Lambos could be had for such a princely sum, and how much driving can be done in 30 months, and decline as quickly and politely as possible. But if you’re a person more concerned with signaling their status or preserving their wealth, this $19 million Bugatti proposal is a no-brainer.

Audi unveiled the next vehicle in its all-electric lineup: the Q4 E-tron SUV. Smaller than the regular E-tron, the compact Q4 still packs a nice punch, with 280 miles of range, twin electric motors, and a total power output of 225 kW. But it won’t be hitting dealerships anytime soon: the vehicle was released only in concept form this week at the Geneva Motor Show.

First teased in 2016, the E-tron is Audi’s first real response to the push from parent company Volkswagen Group to electrify its entire lineup of cars by 2030. At first glance, the Q4 looks just like the E-tron, only slightly shrunk down. The compact SUV is 4.59 meters long (180 inches), 1.90 meters wide (75 inches), and 1.61 meters tall (63 inches). Audi isn’t revealing the price yet, most likely waiting until we’re closer to the planned production launch at the end of 2020, but expect it to be priced cheaper than the $74,800 E-tron.

A year ago, Aston Martin wowed attendees of the Geneva Motor Show with the audacious impracticality of its Lagonda limousine concept. This year, the British marque is coming down to earth with an all-terrain SUV concept Lagonda that is... every bit as ridiculous as the first one. Now dubbed the Lagonda All-Terrain Concept, the new car is still the size of a small train carriage, it still has doors longer than a Smart car, and it’s still decorated more plushly than a Swiss lodge. But there’s one key difference: Aston Martin’s promise that the All-Terrain SUV will enter production in Wales in 2022.

So let’s take a moment to try to figure out what parts of this ridiculous assemblage of engineering and luxury excess have a chance of making it in a real road-going vehicle. Aston Martin claims fully autonomous and zero-emissions driving, courtesy of an electric powertrain, both of which can be taken as realistic goals for a 2022 car. The steering wheel and the large displays built into it and the backs of the front seats are fine, and so are the Swarovski crystals embedded into the seat padding and all of the finery that the doors are clad in.

At last year’s Geneva Motor Show, one message was clear: the world’s biggest automakers are going electric. Marquee names like Porsche, Audi, BMW, Jaguar, and Hyundai showed up with or teased all-electric cars, while others arrived with hybrids. It was one of the biggest showcases of electrified drivetrains ever. That made it easy to wonder what the future held for Tesla, which at the time held a firm grip on the EV market.

But instead of fighting for market share, Tesla’s grip only grew tighter across the rest of 2018. By the end of the year, Tesla’s Model 3 was the best-selling EV in the world.

It’s the nature of the Geneva Motor Show that to get to the fun new EV designs, you have to walk past an exhibition of ridiculous vehicular opulence, but nothing was going to slow me down en route to seeing the Honda e Prototype, the evolution of the most appealing electric vehicle concept I’ve yet seen. 2017’s Honda Urban EV Concept charmed me at last year’s Geneva exhibition, showing off a retro three-door design with a bench front seat, a car-spanning ultra-widescreen display on the interior, and huge suicide doors. Its old school minimalism and new school electric powertrain were an irresistible combination for hipsters like me.

The new e Prototype carries over much of the original’s appeal, though loses a few of the edgiest features in the name of practicality. The front seats are now conventional, the enormous single display has been segmented into two touchscreens in the middle and a pair of rear-view monitors on the sides, and the doors have increased in number to five while their opening is now hinged at the front rather than the rear. With a rounded-off front and a more familiar body shape, the e Prototype looks a lot less alien than the concept that spawned it, though it’s also a lot closer to mass production.

In case you missed it at last year’s Geneva Motor Show, Aston Martin resurrected luxury sub-brand Lagonda and announced it would become the automaker’s showcase for EVs going forward. It launched that vision with an opulent — and carpeted! — autonomous concept car. At this year’s show, though, Aston Martin is showing that the company’s vision is getting closer to reality with the Lagonda All-Terrain concept, an autonomous-ready electric SUV that will enter production in 2022.

Aston Martin didn’t release any specs at all for the Lagonda All-Terrain, which looks somewhat like a Jaguar I-Pace that’s been stretched from both ends. And while it more closely resembles a production car than last year’s concept, it’s still pretty far out.

Supercars and hypercars are all about speed, and one of the tried and true ways to generate speed is to cut out as much weight as possible. This is a huge focus of Aston Martin’s new AM-RB 003 hypercar — so much so that the company isn’t even including a dashboard touchscreen. Instead, if you want to look at navigation, or tap through Spotify, you’re going to have to stick your phone in a mount on the dashboard.

Something tells me that the 500 people who will ever own this car will actually care. They’ll still be walking away with a car that’s going to be capable of... well, we actually don’t know, because Aston Martin didn’t share any specs.

Mercedes-Benz is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of commercial vans, especially at the high end, and the company is looking to protect that status in the future with an electric concept van announced Tuesday at the Geneva Motor Show.

The EQV concept van, as it’s called, is supposedly capable of traveling up to 249 miles on a full charge thanks to a 100kWh battery that makes up most of the van’s floor. (That would tie it with Tesla for the largest commercial battery pack in a road car at the moment.) A 150kW (201 horsepower) electric motor system on the front axle will provide some kick, too. The van will also feature Mercedes-Benz’s voice-activated MBUX infotainment system, which offers EV-specific features like the ability to base the navigation on how much battery is left.

In January, Volkswagen teased a new electric dune buggy, a modern reinterpretation of the classic American dune buggies that were first created in the 1960s. Now, the battery-powered buggy is making its global debut this week at the Geneva Motor Show, and it has a name: the I.D. Buggy, placing it alongside the automaker’s other I.D.-branded vehicles that are meant to represent VW’s all-electric future.

The I.D. Buggy is at once futuristic and retro. A 62 kWh lithium-ion battery is integrated into the buggy’s floor, while a 201-horsepower electric motor in the rear gives it an expected range of 155 miles on the WLTP cycle (the EU’s new, more stringent standard for measuring EV range). The battery is designed for short but active distances — in other words, you won’t be taking this on any road trips. On paved roads, the buggy can sprint from zero to 62 mph in 7.2 seconds. The maximum speed is electronically controlled at 99 mph.

Mercedes-Benz has pulled the cover off its first ever all-electric racecar on the eve of the 2019 Geneva Motor Show. Dubbed the EQ Silver Arrow 01, which is a nod to the automaker’s flashy electric concept racecar, it’s what Mercedes-Benz will use to compete in EV racing series Formula E starting at the end of 2019.

Formula E was launched in 2014 as an all-electric alternative to Formula One and other gas-powered motorsports. What started as a relatively novel idea (other attempts had been made at electric racing, though almost none succeeded) has flourished into a sport with a legitimate, if modest, following. The series is currently in the middle of its fifth season, and it already pits a bevy of high-profile automakers against each other every month, including Audi, BMW, Nissan, and Jaguar. Porsche is also set to join the series starting next year.

During last year’s Paris Motor Show, Daimler unveiled its Smart Forease electric concept car, a cute electric car designed to celebrate the brand’s 20th anniversary. Next week, the company will showcase the Forease+ at the Geneva Motor Show, a cute successor that also happens to comes with a roof.

Daimler described last year’s effort as a demonstration that the brand could think “unconventionally,” and that the Smart Forease was a “free spirit.” That might be the case, but it was also so free-spirited that it came without a roof. This year’s model corrects that drawback with a removable fabric one.

Honda revealed more details Wednesday about the all-electric city car it first revealed back in 2017. One surprise: apparently the first version we saw, the Urban EV, was actually a prototype to the prototype; this latest version, dubbed the Honda e Prototype, will make its debut at the Geneva Motor Show next week. And as you can see, it’s still cute.

This adorably retro vehicle will go into production later this year, after which it will be available for purchase first in Europe, followed by other markets, Honda says. When that happens, the vehicle will be Honda’s first compact car on a dedicated EV platform. Honda claims it will deliver a range of over 200 km (124 miles) and a “fast charge” functionality of 80 percent battery charge in 30 minutes. We don’t have much else in terms of specs, but the interior is now looking more finished, and still retains that retro futuristic charm that is sure to appeal to a lot of car buyers.

The first all-electric car from Volvo Cars is here. Polestar, the performance sub-brand that was spun out of Volvo in 2017, announced its second car on Wednesday, the aptly named Polestar 2. Billed as a competitor to Tesla’s Model 3, the electric sedan will combine might with smarts, as it will be the first car to feature Google’s new native version of Android for the car.

The Polestar 2 should be able to travel up to 275 miles (about 443 kilometers) on a single charge thanks to a 78kWh battery that makes up the entire floor of the car, according to the automaker. It will be quick, too; Polestar says there’s 300kW (about 408 horsepower) to play with, spread across dual electric motors. That all-wheel drive power should help the car get from 0 to 60 miles per hour in under 5 seconds.