As history says, a beautiful place that is located across central and southeastern Europe is Croatia which used to be a part of Yugoslavia. A country that is renowned for its culture, nature, gastronomy, its remarkable history, and a population of four million. However, there aren’t any tracebacks of Croatia’s participation in the race of automobile manufacturing since long back. But as we’re stepping towards the electric age, a whole new era of electrified living standards, history never gets old enough to be rewritten.
All thanks to Mate Rimac the founder of Rimac Automobili, Croatia has not only marked itself on the map of automobile manufacturing giants but has also gained the title for manufacturing the quickest as well as fastest 1914-hp production car to date for 2024, the Rimac Nevera.
Yes, you’ve heard that right, Rimac Nevera is the fastest as well as quickest electric production car to date for 2024, immensely surpassing its top tier competitor Bugatti Chiron Super Sport with 1914-hp of power and 2360 Nm of peak torque packed underneath a 120-kWh battery. As the name suggests “Nevera”, a striking Mediterranean thunderstorm that traces its roots across the open Adriatic Sea of Croatia.
Rimac Nevera fabulously justifies its name while counting it’s worth in millions and leaves behind the legacy of other exotic supercars or hypercars such as the Ferraris, Bugattis, Koenigseggs, McLarens, and Lamborghinis as of being less powerful and exclusive than the all-electric Rimac Nevera.
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Mate Rimac – The Visionary Behind Rimac Automobili
Mate Rimac or should we say MA-ta RE-mats as pronounced in Croatia? He used to race his old lime green coloured BMW E30 until the engine burst into flames. Since then, inspired by the ideas of the Croatian-born electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla, he decided to bring some modifications to the BMW, turning it into an electric car.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go well as expected by Mate at first, his fellow car racers which he competed against used to tease him about bringing a washing machine to a motorsports event. Fortunately for Mate Rimac, the teasing went well enough and motivated him to work more on his first project car, the BMW E30 EV. Finally, in April of 2011, his electric BMW set five Guinness and FIA world records, accelerating from 0 to 100 kph (62 mph) in just 3.3 seconds.
From then, after seven major rebuilds, there came a point when he realized that his E30 EV had less of the BMW’s DNA and much more of his own. At the age of only 21 years old, he layed the founding bricks of Rimac Automobili in his parent’s garage at home. Rimac had better ideas circulating in his mind concerning the future of Rimac Automobili and was already working on the development of his second project car from scratch, the Concept One.
The Concept One hypercar was the base of the development of Rimac Nevera, also referred to as the C Two. It looked like a softened-up sports car with a funnel-shaped indentation on each side, from front to rear, similar to that of a sideways necktie! The necktie is a Croatian invention, surely it deserves to be the icing on the cake for Croatia’s only automobile.
The Birth of Rimac Concept One Hypercar
Later in 2011, Mate Rimac’s envisioned Concept One hypercar came to life, handbuilt by Rimac’s small team of eight employees to display it at the Frankfurt Motor Show.
This was the same Concept One hypercar, that brought Rimac to people’s attention after the famous Top Gear TV personality, Richard Hammond crashed it into flames in a hill-climb race for Top Gear’s follow-up show, The Grand Tour. Thankfully, Hammond escaped with a broken shin just as the car burst into flames.
Rimac Nevera – Fastest Electric Production Car of 2024
Now, it was time for the world to see how capable Rimac’s EV technology was, and this is where the C Two hypercar project was born. However, the C_Two hypercar project required funds for precise development, for which, the company started providing their EV technology to other car makers, including Porsche, Hyundai, and Koenigsegg, while making their first profit in 2013.
Two years later, the team expanded to some 100 people; in 2017, that jumped to 250, and in the year 2018 they finally unveiled the C Two hypercar (which later became Nevera) at the Geneva Motor Show. The C Two soon came to production as the first customer-ready Rimac Nevera, being delivered to the 2016 Formula One World Champion Nico Rosberg. Rimac Automobili’s technology and engineering was excelling at a very high pace by the year 2020, they confirmed “working with almost every single OEM in Europe” with a team of 850 people.
Bugatti Rimac Group
As of November 2021, Rimac Automobili followed a merger with renowned French hypercar manufacturer brand Bugatti and led the formation of Bugatti Rimac Group. After the acquisition of Bugatti, Mate Rimac is also now the new CEO of the French hypercar manufacturer and is planning to build a successor to the Bugatti Chiron (Possibly a hybrid or fully electric).
Mate Rimac is the man Croatia needs to be proud of. Currently, Rimac has authorized 12 dealers in the United States to sell their electric cars, asking for Two million Euros, or $2,073,000 as the Rimac Nevera price. Also, Rimac has expanded its production facility to a massive state-of-the-art “Campus” facility near Zagreb in Croatia.
Still, after everything went well, of course, he required more money for the production of Rimac Nevera. Mate Rimac did find a tricky solution to this problem and grew a beard so he’d look older. He received an investment opportunity and a five-year absolution from taxes at the cost of moving his company from Croatia to Germany, where a gigantic supplier network and experienced expertise were waiting to assist him.
But, Mate refused to shift the company from Croatia to any other country. The same repeated with another offer from the Middle East, which he refused.
The Era Of Rimac’s Rise in the Electric Automobile Industry
After all, venture seed funding arrived from Saudi Arabia, with entirely documented venture capital paperwork. However, one big issue remained. There was a lack of good legal expertise in Croatia that could execute such paperwork because no one in Croatia ever experienced handling such kind of venture capital sent in their country. To find a solution, Mate hired a lawyer from abroad who executed the paperwork successfully and Rimac Automobili made its operations expand rapidly.
Presently, Rimac Automobili has a team of more than 1900 employees, with nearly 700 engineers. To witness the story of Rimac’s dedication and excellence in his work, there is a section of the company headquarters called the “gallery”, where you’ll notice various crash-tested prototype Neveras share space with Mate’s collection of vehicles.
He has several Ferrari’s even a rare exotic Mercedes SLR-McLaren, and a Bugatti Chiron. If we talk about most of Rimac’s creative productivity, his first project car the BMW E30 EV played an incredible role in his success, you can see the body shell of the same first-generation BMW E30 perfectly displayed in the “gallery”.
To keep the performance game even more exclusive, Rimac Automobili has started to produce just 150 units worldwide, which will make this electric beast super rare to be spotted on the ordinary streets of America, Europe, or the United Arab Emirates. The testament of a standard Rimac Nevera price falls around $2,200,000 and can reach up to $3,000,000 for the performance-oriented “Rimac Nevera Time Attack” variant.
So as the Rimac Nevera price tag denotes, this finest automotive engineering masterpiece is suitably the best to be parked inside one of the country’s millionaire garages, including the F1 Champion Nico Rosberg. For people who think electric vehicles are sort of magically churning motors that are boring to drive, well we can challenge you to check this one out.
