Rimac emerged in a country without a large modern car-manufacturing tradition, without the backing of an established automotive group, and without a heritage brand whose history could be turned into a sales argument. The starting point was a converted BMW 3 Series E30, not a plan to build a group employing thousands of specialists. Yet within little more than a decade, the Croatian team progressed from constructing a single electric car to designing its own battery systems, inverters, electric motors, control systems and complete hypercars. At the same time, it began supplying technology to other manufacturers, attracted capital from some of the industry's largest players and, in 2021, became central to a new ownership structure for Bugatti.
It is easy to reduce that story to a handful of acceleration records and the biography of Mate Rimac. Doing so misses the most important part of the transformation. Rimac did not build its position simply because it could create a very fast electric car. The more consequential decision was to treat the car from the beginning as a demonstrator for a wider set of capabilities: power electronics, software, energy management, battery design, all-wheel drive and individual wheel-torque control. The hypercar was a product, but it was also the most visible showcase for a technology business.
By 2026, the name “Rimac” referred to several related but distinct entities. Rimac Group is the holding company. Rimac Technology develops and manufactures systems for external customers. Bugatti Rimac is responsible for the Bugatti and Rimac Automobili marques, each of which retains its own product identity. The wider group has also developed activities in stationary energy storage and autonomous mobility. Keeping those names separate is essential, because the story of the small Rimac Automobili manufacturer has become the story of an organisation far broader than a single-model carmaker.
2009: a car whose components could not simply be bought
Rimac’s beginnings are unusual even by the standards of small sports-car manufacturers. Mate Rimac did not start by sketching the body of a future hypercar or by licensing an existing engine. His early laboratory was a 1984 BMW 3 Series E30 used, among other things, for drifting and amateur competition. When its combustion engine failed, Rimac began converting the car to electric power.
The first version was not a mature design. Successive rebuilds changed the motor, batteries, electronics and control system. The lack of suitable off-the-shelf components became an important influence on the company’s later business model. If a commercially available part could not deliver the required power, mass or control strategy, the team tried to design its own.
Rimac Automobili was registered in Croatia in 2009. Early operations were concentrated around Sveta Nedelja near Zagreb. The company was tiny, and the Croatian automotive supplier ecosystem was nothing like Baden-Württemberg, northern Italy or Britain’s Motorsport Valley. That increased the need to build expertise inside the company, but it also gave the team freedom to design without an inherited vehicle architecture.
The converted BMW, later known as the e-M3, became progressively faster. In 2011, Rimac used it for acceleration runs over distances ranging from an eighth of a mile to one mile. After the relevant homologation process, the results were recognised by the FIA and Guinness World Records. The record mattered as publicity, but the process required to achieve it was arguably more important. The team had to learn not only how to increase power, but how to manage temperature, traction, battery state and repeatability.
In later company storytelling, the e-M3 became the symbol of Rimac’s garage origins. That should not be mistaken for evidence that one person single-handedly created the technology that followed. Moving from a converted BMW to a homologated hypercar required engineering teams, investors, a supply chain and automotive development processes that cannot be reproduced in one workshop.
Concept_One: the hypercar as a system demonstrator
The first car designed by Rimac from the ground up was publicly shown in September 2011 at the Frankfurt motor show. Concept_One appeared at a time when electric cars were returning to the automotive mainstream, but most of the market was focused on running costs, local zero-emission driving and range. Rimac tried to use the same basic type of propulsion for a very different purpose: supercar-level performance without copying the mechanical layout of a combustion-engined car.
The most important feature of Concept_One was not its headline power figure. The car used four electric motors, one for each wheel, combined with an electronic system capable of managing torque distribution in real time. In practice, the propulsion system, stability functions and differential behaviour could be treated as one integrated system. Rimac developed its own control algorithms for this architecture, later described in successive forms as All Wheel Torque Vectoring.
Four independently controlled motors offered possibilities unavailable to a conventional car with one central engine and mechanical differentials. The electronics could increase or reduce torque at one wheel more quickly than a traditional brake-based system. That did not automatically guarantee better handling in every situation. It required very accurate models of tyre behaviour, grip, accelerator position, steering angle, wheel speeds and body motion. For Rimac, however, it was one of the technologies that connected the car business to the company’s broader engineering ambitions.
The production version of Concept_One was presented in 2016. Rimac stated a system output of 800 kW, approximately 1,088 hp, and 1,600 Nm of torque. The company claimed 0–100 km/h in 2.6 seconds and a top speed of 355 km/h. Battery capacity was 82 kWh. Unlike the later Nevera, the rear motors worked through two-speed dual-clutch transmissions, while the front axle used single-speed gearboxes.
Eight Concept_One cars were built. That figure makes clear that the model was not an attempt to create a conventionally profitable series at the scale of a traditional manufacturer. It served several purposes at once: proving that the team could deliver a complete car, providing a road-going platform for technology development and attracting the attention of potential business customers. The pattern that later defined Rimac Group was already visible: an extremely expensive, very low-volume car formed the public face of the company, while much of the value was being created beneath the bodywork.
From carmaker to technology supplier
Rimac began working for other manufacturers early in its development. Strategically, this was more important than simply increasing Concept_One production. Building a proprietary hypercar required enormous investment, while the potential customer base was necessarily tiny. Selling know-how, components and engineering services allowed the same expertise to be used across more programmes.
One of the most visible projects was the car prepared for the 2015 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. The Tajima Rimac E-Runner Concept_One used a powertrain developed by the Croatian company. Nobuhiro “Monster” Tajima completed the climb in 9:32.401 and finished second overall. First place also went to an electric car, driven by Rhys Millen. For Rimac, Pikes Peak was useful as an extreme test of cooling, power control and battery behaviour under sustained load.
Around the same period, the company became involved in programmes for other hypercar manufacturers. Rimac supplied the high-voltage battery system for the Koenigsegg Regera, whose hybrid architecture was among the most unusual of its era. It later worked on the battery system for the Aston Martin Valkyrie. These projects mattered not because they allowed Rimac to add famous marques to a client list, but because they required the company to meet an external customer’s standards. A supplier cannot develop solely to its own timing or its own definition of quality.
Another major step was the partnership with Automobili Pininfarina. In 2018, the companies announced an agreement covering the powertrain, batteries and related electronics and software for the PF0 project, which entered production as the Battista. At the same time, Rimac was working on projects for other manufacturers, including companies within the Volkswagen Group. Gradually, it stopped being viewed merely as the exotic builder of one electric car and started functioning as a supplier to a segment with exceptionally demanding technical requirements.
Capital: how a small company began growing faster than its car production
Developing proprietary batteries, inverters, motors and software required far more capital than a typical tuning or low-volume sports-car programme. Rimac therefore began bringing in outside investors, although each investment should not be interpreted as a transfer of control.
In 2017, China’s Camel Group invested a total of €30 million in Rimac Automobili and the related Greyp Bikes business, with the great majority of the capital directed to the automotive operation. For Rimac, that money primarily funded recruitment, product development and production capacity.
The following year was even more significant. Rimac unveiled its second-generation hypercar in Geneva, initially known as C_Two. A few months later, Porsche acquired a 10 percent stake in Rimac Automobili. The German company increased its holding to 15.5 percent in 2019 and to 24 percent in 2021. In parallel, Hyundai Motor Group announced an €80 million investment in 2019, comprising €64 million from Hyundai Motor and €16 million from Kia Motors.
For a small Croatian company, the presence of investors of this scale had two effects. First, it supplied capital for expansion. Second, it acted as a form of technical validation. Porsche and Hyundai were not investing only in an impressive prototype; they were interested in the team’s capabilities in electrification, power electronics and powertrain integration.
At the same time, successive funding rounds made the ownership structure more complex. Mate Rimac remained the largest shareholder and the public face of the company, but it could no longer be described simply as a founder-owned startup. In the years that followed, it became necessary to separate the automotive, technology and holding-company activities more formally.
C_Two becomes Nevera
C_Two, unveiled in 2018, was a far more mature programme than Concept_One. Rimac planned a series of 150 cars, and the model was intended to undergo the full homologation, crash-testing, software-development and validation process required for sales across multiple markets. That demanded a different organisational scale from building eight examples of the first car.
In June 2021, the production version was introduced under the name Nevera, taken from the sudden storms that form over the Adriatic. The car retained the fundamental four-motor layout, but practically every key system had been redeveloped or substantially revised compared with the C_Two prototypes.
Rimac quotes 1,408 kW, equivalent to 1,914 hp, for the system. Four motors drive the wheels individually, with torque management integrated into the vehicle-dynamics control system. The 120 kWh battery also forms a structural element within the car’s carbon-fibre construction. Rimac states a WLTP range of up to 489 km. In a hypercar, that figure obviously does not describe energy use under full-power driving, but it provides a standardised homologation reference.
The claimed 0–100 km/h time is 1.81 seconds using a procedure that includes one-foot rollout. That qualification matters. A result recorded with rollout is not directly comparable with a measurement beginning from a true standstill, so headline numbers from different manufacturers do not form a fair ranking unless the methodology is known.
Nevera also demonstrated how far Rimac had moved beyond treating an electric car as a simple combination of a battery and four powerful motors. Much of the car’s character depends on software: torque control, regenerative braking, thermal management, charging, stability management and the way power is released. In a traditional sports car, many behaviours are determined directly by differential geometry, gear ratios and the characteristics of the engine. In Nevera, a much larger part of the dynamic behaviour can be shaped in code, even though tyres, mass, aerodynamics and physics still set the ultimate limits.
Nevera’s records and the problem with simple comparisons
Rimac has used records as a credibility-building tool since its earliest years. With Nevera, the number of performance attempts became unusually large. In 2022, the car reached 412 km/h in a top-speed run. In 2023, Rimac announced a series of 23 performance records, including 0–400–0 km/h in 29.93 seconds. The same year, Nevera completed the Nürburgring’s full production-car configuration in 7:05.298, setting what was then the production electric-car record.
Such results are useful, but they need precise descriptions. A top-speed run is not the same thing as a record based on an average of two runs in opposite directions. A 0–100 km/h time can depend on whether rollout is used. A Nürburgring lap time makes sense only when the circuit configuration and vehicle category are stated. A 0–400–0 km/h test, meanwhile, measures both acceleration and the ability to stop the car after reaching an extremely high speed.
Rimac generally publishes information about the timing equipment and conditions used for its major attempts, which makes the figures easier to evaluate. That does not change the fact that records are also marketing communications. The more important engineering lesson from Nevera is less dramatic than a single number of seconds: the car could repeatedly deploy enormous power without immediately falling into thermal limitation, and its traction-control system could transfer that power to the road. That repeatability matters more technically than an isolated “fastest car” headline.
Nevera R: less grand tourer, more dynamically focused hypercar
In 2024, Rimac introduced the Nevera R. It was not a second generation of the car, but a more aggressive derivative of the same basic architecture. Changes included the aerodynamics, tyres, suspension, brakes, powertrain control and system output. Rimac quotes 1,550 kW, or 2,107 hp, along with a 108 kWh battery. Production was limited to 40 cars.
The difference between the standard Nevera and the R illustrates the maturity of the programme. The original Nevera had to prove that an electric hypercar could be extraordinarily fast while still retaining some of the qualities of a road-going grand tourer. The R was more clearly optimised for response, grip and track use.
In 2025, Rimac announced another series of performance records for Nevera R. The car completed the 0–400–0 km/h test in 25.79 seconds, and the company also published times for a range of intermediate speed thresholds. Regardless of how long individual records remain unbeaten, Nevera R shows that Rimac continues to use its own car to develop drive-control algorithms, thermal systems and power electronics.
The company also announced ten Nevera R Founder’s Edition cars in 2025. The first customer example was delivered in early 2026. Such editions are common in the hypercar market: they increase exclusivity and margin, but should not be mistaken for a new technical generation.
Technical success did not guarantee sales of 150 cars
Nevera’s history also has a less comfortable side. Rimac intended to produce 150 examples of the standard model. By the middle of 2024, however, Mate Rimac was publicly saying that a little more than 50 cars had been delivered. The comment came in the broader context of demand for very expensive all-electric hypercars being weaker than expected.
That matters because it challenged the simple assumption that electrification at the very top of the market must progress in the same way as it does in mass-market vehicles. A customer buying a family SUV may see quietness, efficiency and the ease of driving an EV as major benefits. A hypercar buyer may also be searching for mechanical theatre: engine noise, gearchanges, vibration, a sense of mechanical complexity and technological rarity. Electric propulsion has real advantages in response and precision of control, but some of those advantages are shared by cars costing a fraction of the price.
Mate Rimac therefore began saying that Nevera’s successor did not necessarily have to be fully electric. That did not mean the group was abandoning electrification. Rimac Technology continued developing batteries, motors and electronics for EVs, while Nevera remained a technological flagship. What changed was the company’s assessment of the collector-car market.
That correction is important when judging Rimac. The company proved that it could build one of the most advanced electric road cars in the world. It did not prove that having the strongest objective performance automatically creates demand for 150 cars costing around €2 million each. In the hypercar segment, technology is only one part of a product’s value.
2021: Bugatti Rimac changes the scale of responsibility
The biggest organisational change came in 2021. Rimac Group and Porsche created the Bugatti Rimac joint venture. Rimac Group took 55 percent, while Porsche held 45 percent. The Bugatti and Rimac Automobili marques were placed inside the new company, with each intended to retain its own product identity.
This was not simply a case of a small Croatian marque taking over Bugatti. The structure had several layers. Rimac Group became the majority owner of Bugatti Rimac, but Porsche remained a significant shareholder both in the joint venture and in Rimac Group itself. Rimac Technology, meanwhile, was intended to operate as a separate technology business owned by Rimac Group.
For Mate Rimac and his team, this meant moving from responsibility for a young hypercar marque to sharing responsibility for one of the most historically loaded names in the car industry. Bugatti had its own operation in Molsheim, its own product culture and customers accustomed to multi-cylinder combustion engines. Rimac could not simply apply Nevera’s technology and turn Bugatti into a second electric marque.
The strongest evidence came with the Tourbillon, unveiled in 2024. Instead of a fully electric successor to the Chiron, Bugatti developed a hybrid with a naturally aspirated V16 and three electric motors. Rimac Technology supplies elements of the high-voltage and electric-drive system to the programme. Tourbillon is therefore an example of Rimac expertise being used without converting Bugatti into another electric-car brand.
The creation of Rimac Technology: separating the supplier from the car marque
As the number of outside customers increased, the technology operation had to become more clearly separated from the production of Rimac’s own cars. Formalising Rimac Technology allowed the group to distinguish its relationships with external manufacturers from the Bugatti Rimac hypercar business.
The separation has practical value. A carmaker entrusting a supplier with data about a future model does not want to compete for engineering resources with a sister marque’s car without clear organisational boundaries. At the same time, Rimac Technology can develop components and platforms in volumes far greater than the few dozen hypercars produced each year.
In 2022, Rimac Group raised €500 million in a Series D round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Goldman Sachs Asset Management, with participation from existing investors. The company was valued at more than €2 billion. The money was intended primarily to support expansion of the technology business and construction of the new campus.
In the following years, Rimac Technology announced programmes that illustrated the shift in scale. In 2024, BMW Group disclosed a long-term partnership covering the joint development and production of high-voltage battery systems for selected future electric vehicles. The same year, Rimac announced the supply of integrated electric drive systems for Saudi Arabian marque Ceer. The company also developed subsequent generations of e-axles and battery systems, including projects involving solid-state cells in cooperation with external materials and cell-technology partners.
This is a different business from Rimac Automobili. A hypercar can justify the cost and hand assembly of solutions that would be uneconomic at tens of thousands of units. A supplier to a large OEM must achieve repeatability, quality control, traceability and true serial-production capability. Moving between those two worlds is one of the group’s biggest challenges.
The campus near Zagreb: infrastructure for the next stage
The growing number of employees and programmes quickly exceeded the capacity of Rimac’s existing facilities. In 2021, the company presented plans for a large campus in Kerestinec near Zagreb. The project was intended to bring together research, development, component production, prototyping and parts of the hypercar operation.
The first major phase was completed in 2024. Rimac said at the time that roughly 75,000 m² of production space had been completed, with about €120 million invested at that stage and a planned total cost of more than €300 million. Around 400 employees began moving into the new facility, while Rimac’s Croatian workforce exceeded 1,500. The campus was designed ultimately to accommodate about 2,500 people.
Its scale matters not because Rimac plans to manufacture hundreds of thousands of its own cars. The campus is intended to support very different processes: software development, battery design, production of systems for external customers, prototyping, laboratories and work on both Bugatti and Rimac models.
It is also one of the most visible economic consequences of the company’s growth. Croatia did not previously have a globally significant passenger-car manufacturer or a major development centre for high-voltage powertrain systems. Rimac has not created a national automotive industry on the scale of the Czech Republic or Slovakia, but it has built a concentration of expertise in the region that was previously difficult to find.
Rimac Technology matures into series production
In 2024, Rimac Technology began producing systems at higher volumes. By 2026, the company was reporting deliveries of tens of thousands of battery and drive systems, with additional production lines being prepared for subsequent programmes. Those numbers are still small compared with the world’s largest Tier 1 suppliers, but they are on an entirely different scale from a 150-car Nevera programme.
In February 2026, Nurdin Pitarević became CEO of Rimac Technology and Marko Brkljačić became COO. The management change was a signal that the supplier business was intended to operate increasingly like a standalone industrial company rather than an engineering department subordinate to a hypercar manufacturer.
Rimac Technology now develops complete battery systems, power electronics, electric drive units, software and control systems. That does not mean every component in every project comes solely from Rimac. The company relies on external cell manufacturers, semiconductor materials suppliers and many other component makers. Much of its value lies in integration: designing the enclosure, cooling, safety architecture, electronics, control strategy and the way the system works with the rest of the vehicle.
Rimac Energy and Verne: the group expands beyond hypercars
Rimac Group’s growth has not been limited to road cars and electric powertrain components. The wider organisation has also developed Rimac Energy, which operates in stationary energy storage. Some expertise in batteries, electronics and thermal management transfers from automotive applications, although the requirements for lifetime, cost and safety are different.
Another project is Verne, a company developing an autonomous urban-mobility system. It grew out of the initiative previously known as Project 3 Mobility. It is not simply another Rimac-branded car. Verne has its own organisational structure, product and business model centred on an autonomous vehicle and mobility service.
These businesses show how far Rimac Group has moved from the traditional image of a car manufacturer. The holding company is using expertise developed in electric propulsion and software to build several different businesses. That increases potential scale, but it also increases management risk. Each segment has different investment cycles, different customers and different competitors.
Management changes: the company becomes less dependent on one person
For years, Rimac’s public image was almost inseparable from Mate Rimac. The founder appeared as CEO, technology spokesman, presenter of new models and negotiator of the most important partnerships. As the group expanded, that structure became increasingly difficult to sustain.
In November 2024, Antony Sheriff was appointed CEO of Rimac Group, while Mate Rimac moved to the role of President of the Group Management Board and remained a central figure at Bugatti Rimac. Subsequent communications emphasised the division of responsibility among the holding-company level, the technology business and the hypercar operations.
Not all current corporate materials are fully consistent in the way they describe the group-level titles. Some pages still present Mate Rimac as CEO of Rimac Group, while newer press releases continue to identify Antony Sheriff as CEO and Mate Rimac as President. It is safer to treat this as a period of transitional or inconsistently communicated governance rather than arbitrarily selecting one title as definitive.
Mate Rimac’s role at Bugatti Rimac is less ambiguous. After the 2026 ownership changes, he remained CEO of the joint company and became President of Bugatti Automobiles. Rimac Technology, meanwhile, has its own CEO. This decentralisation reflects the scale of an organisation that can no longer depend on one founder personally approving most important decisions.
2026: Porsche exits the shareholding structure
In April 2026, Porsche announced an agreement to sell all of its holdings in Bugatti Rimac and Rimac Group to a consortium led by HOF Capital. The transaction covered Porsche’s 45 percent stake in Bugatti Rimac and its 20.6 percent holding in Rimac Group. BlueFive Capital became the largest investor in the consortium, with additional capital from other institutional investors in the United States and Europe.
In September 2026, after the required approvals had been obtained, the transaction closed. Porsche reported proceeds of approximately €1 billion. It was one of the most significant ownership changes in Rimac’s history because it ended the equity relationship with a partner that had steadily increased its involvement since 2018.
The sale did not dismantle Bugatti Rimac. Rimac Group retained 55 percent of the joint venture, while the HOF-led consortium took the 45 percent stake previously owned by Porsche. At the same time, it acquired Porsche’s stake in Rimac Group itself.
The significance of the change extends beyond the transfer of shares. Porsche had been more than a financial investor. Its presence had also strengthened the credibility of the small Croatian company in its dealings with the wider industry. After Porsche’s exit, the group has to show that it can continue developing Bugatti Rimac and its technology businesses with a new capital base, without the same kind of strategic link to one of the world’s most important sports-car manufacturers.
At the same time, the transaction does not erase the years of cooperation. Processes, capabilities, contacts and products developed during the partnership remain inside the organisation. For Rimac, this is better understood as the beginning of another phase than as a return to the kind of independence it had in 2009.
What is actually proprietary in Rimac’s technology
Hypercar marketing often uses language that suggests complete self-sufficiency. In practice, no modern car is built without a large supplier network. Rimac also buys cells, semiconductor components, safety-system parts, tyres, materials and thousands of smaller items.
What is unusual is the extent to which it designs the systems that define the vehicle’s behaviour. That includes the battery-pack architecture, battery management, inverters, electric motors, torque control, vehicle-control software, thermal systems and integration of the complete powertrain. In Nevera, Rimac can therefore design the car as one system rather than adapting the chassis to an off-the-shelf powertrain package purchased from a large supplier.
That degree of vertical integration is particularly valuable while a technology is developing quickly. A change in battery parameters can be considered alongside changes to inverter control and cooling rather than negotiated among several separate suppliers. This helps when chasing extreme performance in a low-volume vehicle.
The cost is equally significant. Every proprietary system has to be validated, homologated, secured in software, documented and supported for years. In a hypercar, those development costs are spread over only dozens or hundreds of vehicles. That is why Rimac Technology is so important to the wider business model: it allows some investment in knowledge and infrastructure to be reused in programmes produced at much higher volumes.
Software as part of the chassis
Rimac is often described through motor power and battery capacity, but its most important advantage does not necessarily lie in any single component. Four motors do not automatically make Nevera a good car. The system has to decide within milliseconds how much torque each wheel should receive, how regenerative braking should blend with friction braking, how temperatures should remain within safe limits and how the car should respond when grip changes.
In that sense, software is as much a part of the chassis as suspension geometry. The character of the vehicle can be altered without replacing a mechanical differential, but software cannot escape physical limits. A poor algorithm cannot create tyre grip that does not exist. A good one can use the available grip more precisely and more quickly.
This experience also has value for Rimac Technology’s customers. As electric drivetrains become more important, an increasing part of the difference between cars comes from controller calibration, thermal strategies and energy management. For traditional manufacturers, that means developing software capabilities that were once much less central to the defining behaviour of the powertrain.
Rimac and Croatia
Rimac is often presented as proof that an advanced car manufacturer can emerge outside the traditional automotive centres. The statement is broadly fair, but it needs qualification. From the beginning, the company relied on a global supply chain, foreign investors and specialists from many countries. It did not build the entire ecosystem exclusively from resources available locally.
Even so, the company’s significance for Croatia is difficult to overstate. Its headquarters, a large share of research and development and its new production capacity remained in the Zagreb region. It employed local engineers, attracted specialists from abroad and created opportunities to work on programmes that previously would have required relocation to Germany, Britain, Italy or Sweden.
Rimac also changed the way the international industry viewed Croatia as a place for automotive technology development. That does not turn the country into a major car producer by itself. It does, however, provide an example of building a high-value specialist niche without first having a large-scale vehicle-assembly base.
The limits of Rimac’s model
The group’s development is often told as a story of almost uninterrupted growth, but its business model carries serious risks. The first is capital intensity. Hypercars, battery production lines, a research and manufacturing campus, autonomous mobility and stationary energy storage all require large investments before they generate stable returns.
The second risk is scale. Rimac Technology aims to serve programmes measured in tens of thousands of systems rather than tens of cars. A process that works when parts for Nevera can be selected and checked by hand has to be replaced by one that is statistically controlled and robust against supplier variation. Many technology companies encounter their hardest problems at precisely this transition.
The third is dependence on automotive investment cycles. A large battery contract may support years of production, but a customer delaying a model, changing architecture or reacting to a market downturn can shift revenue by many quarters. A technology supplier is less dependent on the sales of one proprietary model, but more dependent on its customers’ programme schedules.
The fourth risk is the hypercar market itself. Nevera demonstrated that extreme objective performance is not enough to sell a complete planned series immediately. Rimac is a young marque and does not have decades of heritage that, for Ferrari, Porsche or Bugatti, forms part of the collector value.
Finally, the group has become organisationally complex. Bugatti Rimac, Rimac Automobili, Rimac Technology, Rimac Energy and Verne operate in different segments. As the organisation grows, it becomes harder to retain the decision-making speed of a small team while also building the processes required in a regulated industry that carries long-term responsibility for its products.
Rimac in October 2026
At the beginning of October 2026, Rimac is already far more than the company that builds Nevera. Rimac Group controls 55 percent of Bugatti Rimac, while the remaining 45 percent belongs to the HOF Capital-led consortium following Porsche’s exit from the shareholding structure. The consortium also acquired Porsche’s former 20.6 percent stake in Rimac Group during the same year.
Rimac Automobili still centres its product range on the Nevera family, including Nevera R and limited derivatives. A successor has not yet been publicly defined as a finished model, while Mate Rimac’s earlier comments suggest that the company no longer regards a fully electric drivetrain as the mandatory answer for every future hypercar.
Bugatti Rimac is developing the Bugatti Tourbillon and Rimac-branded cars in parallel. At the same time, Rimac Technology is scaling production of systems for outside customers. In the long run, that business may determine the size of the wider group more than the number of hypercars sold.
The new Croatian campus gives the company infrastructure it did not possess in the Concept_One era. It also creates an obligation to use that infrastructure effectively. Rimac must maintain a pipeline of contracts, retain specialist staff and invest in subsequent generations of technology before earlier programmes have fully paid back their costs.
The most important question facing Rimac is therefore not whether it can set another acceleration record. It is whether an organisation built around unusually rapid technical development can become equally good at long-term production, quality, serving multiple customers and managing an increasingly complicated group.
Rimac’s legacy
It is still too early to give a final verdict on Rimac’s legacy. The company is only a little more than a decade old in industrial terms, and many of its most important programmes remain active. Even so, several durable changes are already visible.
First, Rimac helped move the electric car from the category of environmental alternative into the role of a genuine platform for a hypercar. It was not the first manufacturer of an electric vehicle and not the only company developing an extremely powerful battery-electric drivetrain. It did, however, show early that four independently controlled motors and a large battery could be used not as a compromise against combustion power, but as a distinct performance architecture.
Second, the company built supplier credibility through its own product. Concept_One and Nevera were demonstrators on a scale that a component displayed on a trade-show stand could not match. When a potential customer wanted to know whether Rimac could manage a powertrain producing more than a megawatt, the answer could be shown in a functioning road car.
Third, Rimac created an automotive engineering centre of competence in Croatia that had not existed before. The significance goes beyond the number of cars produced. It concerns the ability to design, test and manufacture systems that also end up in vehicles carrying other brands.
Fourth, the company’s story exposes the limits of technological determinism. Nevera is one of the fastest road cars of its era, yet the market did not absorb the planned production run as quickly as expected. In the collector-car segment, emotion, heritage and mechanical experience can be worth as much as objective performance. Rimac itself has increasingly acknowledged that.
The company’s most important achievement is therefore not a single 0–100 km/h record, or even taking responsibility for Bugatti. It is the transition from a garage-built electric BMW project to an organisation capable of developing its own hypercar, supplying key systems to global manufacturers and managing one of the most demanding marques in the automotive world at the same time.
Rimac remains a company in transformation. Its success over the next decade will depend less on whether it can build a faster car than its rivals and more on whether it can scale its technology without losing quality or speed of execution. That is a harder test than a record on a straight road, and it will decide whether Rimac remains primarily a fascinating story about a young hypercar manufacturer or becomes a durable part of the global automotive industry.