QUITE A BIG PLACE, KTM SPORTCAR GmbH’s factory in Graz, Austria. Bigger, in fact, than it needed to be. Back when the X-Bow sports car was first devised, there were visions of building 500 to 1000 cars a year. Since its launch in 2008, only a little over 1500 X-Bows have been sold globally.
Not the numbers envisaged originally, but the open-cockpit, carbon-chassis X-Bow has made its mark on the automotive world, finding customers in 40 countries – and made KTM a marque known for cars as well as motorcycles.
‘The original idea started in 2006, when our CEO, Mr Stefan Pierer, together with head of design Gerald Kiska, decided on an after-work beer,’ says KTM Sportcar MD Michael Woelfling. ‘Sketching ideas on a little sheet of paper, the dream was to build their own car, as radical as the motorcycles, in terms of performance and purity.’ He motions at an original X-Bow