Mate Rimac: from DIY BMW EV to 250mph hypercars

Open gallery Close News by Steve Cropley 9 mins read 10 May 2022 Follow @StvCr Share

Mate Rimac, the distinguished winner of Autocar’s Issigonis Trophy for 2022, has never worked in anyone else’s car business and has been running his own automotive company for only about a dozen years.

Despite this, Zagreb-based Rimac Automobili is on a seemingly unstoppable trajectory to become Croatia’s biggest company very soon – progress that will involve moving most of its 2500 staff to a brand-new headquarters, the country’s biggest building. The driver of this extraordinary expansion is Rimac’s illustrious status, acquired at seemingly impossible speed, as Europe’s go-to provider of advanced electrification solutions for manufacturers of both small and large cars as they forge into the zero-emissions era.

Rimac already counts many of the world’s most important volume car makers – plus premium marques like Aston Martin, Ferrari and Porsche – among his jostling band of blue-chip clients. Indeed, Porsche (2018) and Hyundai (2019) so greatly valued their early experience as customers of Rimac technology that they grabbed opportunities to become investors in the company.

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As if that wasn’t enough, Rimac has also just started production of its own-brand £1.8 million electric hypercar, the Nevera, whose performance and build efficiency have so impressed top management at the Volkswagen Group that six months ago they forged a proposal to merge their problematic Bugatti brand into a new company called Bugatti Rimac, putting Mate Rimac at the head of the team that will build the first new Bugattis of the EV era.

The first, headline-grabbing fact is that he’s still only 34 years old. He’s neither an industry-sponsored university man nor someone who inherited a family car business. He has never been nurtured by ‘Big Automotive’and his country doesn’t have a thriving car industry. Even his awesome car know-how is selfacquired: his University of Zagreb degree was in business management.

His key credential, he reckons, is “being crazy about cars from an early age”, together with a parallel love of electronics, a hero-respect for the work of Nikola Tesla, the Croatia-born electrical pioneer, and a willingness to work as hard and long as it takes to build what he calls “a happy company”.

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Autocar recently travelled to Zagreb to spend a day with Rimac – not the easiest of gigs, because the calls on this man’s time are constant and high-powered. But he meets us with an easy smile, comes across as relaxed and straightforward, chats in immaculate English, ignores his phone screen and can work the coffee machine as well as anyone.

This is a company with an egalitarian heart: the boss sits in an open-plan office, wears chinos and a Rimac-branded polo shirt like his colleagues and doesn’t even have his own parking space. For our scene-setting powwow, we settle into a meeting room named after one of Rimac’s retinue of heroes, Ferdinand Piëch. Other names on nearby rooms include Nico Rosberg (who this month becomes the owner of the first Nevera), Gordon Murray, Louis Chiron, Christian von Koenigsegg and, interestingly, Richard Hammond, the Grand Tour presenter who brought near-ruin to Rimac in 2017 when he crashed a prototype of the Rimac Concept One, the company’s first hypercar.

For now, we’re not in the mighty new headquarters. This one seems big enough: a gigantic, B&Q-style former storage depot elaborately converted for EV development and component manufacturing. The new one, referred to as The Campus, will be four times bigger still and bring all major activities together. It will build electric hypercars. It will do carbonfibre tub and panel manufacturing (using nine new autoclaves). It will make and assemble motors, gearboxes, batteries and inverters for clients – as well as for the Nevera and its cousin, the Pininfarina Battista. And it will make key parts for Bugatti (although that company will keep its assembly plant in Molsheim, France).