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Mate Rimac is the boy who would be king
Given the age of the automobile industry there are few in modern times who have had a really serious impact on the industry. Perhaps Eon Musk might be one but I think even he isn't a match for Mate Rimac, even though Mate Rimac is hardly a house-house name. It's a fascinating story that covers a multitude of angles and wows at every turn. This story was published in Road & Track BY NATE HOPPER on DEC 3, 2021 and makes for fascinating reading.
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From afar, Mate Rimac is both unfathomable and ordinary. The story of the 33-year-old Croat who will now run Bugatti seems to back up his reputation: He’s a visionary, people say, an easygoing guy. He’s just like you and me.
Over just a few short years, Mate Rimac has built a startling network at the pinnacle of hypercars. In addition to gaining the majority stake in Bugatti from Volkswagen Group, the world’s largest automotive company, he will maintain control of his own hybrid company—part builder of the world’s quickest cars, part supplier of batteries and high-performance EV technology to other manufacturers, such as Jaguar, Koenigsegg, and Aston Martin. Once merely an object of sports-car fan-boys’ affection, Rimac (pronounced REE-mats) is a figure who will command the world’s attention.
The story of the man and his namesake company can seem like a fairy tale. And when the wonder fades, one might ask: How?
Mate Rimac was born in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina in one of its poorest towns; a car would pass along gravel roads perhaps once a day. His parents left him with grandparents as they headed in search of work to Germany, where Mate fled when the Yugoslav Wars began. The family moved to Zagreb, Croatia, when Mate was 14. The accent he’d gained abroad made him sound, he’s said, like a “hillbilly,” leading him to suffer the sort of torment teenagers like to inflict on outsiders.
He burrowed into technological design, creating first a glove that behaved like a computer keyboard and mouse and then a mirror system that made cars’ blind spots visible—both of which won international design competitions. When he turned 18, Rimac used the money earned from patents on his inventions to buy a car he could race in local quarter-milers: a 1984 E30 BMW 323i with an engine that quickly blew.
This is when the vision struck him. He would rebuild the busted Bimmer as an electric car. Working with a forklift motor and the help of locals, he tinkered. His longtime friend Marko Brkljačić, who bought his own old BMW for racing around the same time, recalls when Rimac first took him fora drive in the electrified creation he and others built in local garages. Rimac told Brkljačić to put his head all the way back on the cushion—instructions Brkljačić was skeptical of, until the acceleration hit with instantaneity no internal-combustion engine can achieve.
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There were occasional problems during the early races. But within a year or so, Rimac’s silent wonder was beating the muscular engines thundering across the track. (In a photo from that time, Rimac leans on the hood of his green BMW—outfitted with decals resembling a circuit board—the lapels of his button-down flaring out from beneath a sweater, his distant squint slightly undercut by the appearance at his two front teeth peeking from between barely parted lips. “Imagine Mate coming [to the races] like this,” Brkljačić remarks.) The top racer at the local track, who drove a stripped-down Camaro that ran on nitro and alcohol, was toppled.“The guys who were basically making fun of Mate in the end were asking the [local racing] organization to introduce an all-EV category because it was not fair,” Brkljačić says. In 2011, Rimac’s electrified 1984 BMW—homemade in a country with no automotive industry—set five world records.
There was another vision: a fully electric supercar, made from scratch. He and a small crew that grew around him—among them a drone designer for the Croatian Army who was 16 years Rimac’s senior and a fellow 20-something designing cars for General Motors in Germany—committed themselves to the creation. With only a year to go, Rimac booked a spot in the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show—without a motor to show. They worked nights and weekends building every little bit themselves. They sometimes slept precariously beside live batteries. And so the prototype of the Concept One was finished, barely in time. It was not Rimac’s last improbable marvel
Misfortune kept transfiguring into fortune. The royal family of Abu Dhabi, which Rimac has said promised to fund the car—and purchase two—withdrew their backing when, in 2012, Rimac refused to move his operation to the Middle East, away from Croatia. (Rimac would make similar refusals in the future, in devotion to building something in his country.) He put up everything the company had as security on a half-million-euro loan from a local bank. Rimac struggled to pay its utilities, suppliers, and employees. Mate Rimac has called the business’s survival a miracle. It occurred only because the company, for a time, sacrificed nearly all its own carmaking ambitions for the sake of building components for other manufacturers—saving itself and also building the foundation that would later enable it to thrive.
A pre-beard Rimac stands with his first electric-sports-car concept, appropriately named Concept One, at the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show.
The company finally secured funding from sources in South America and China to construct eight Concept Ones. One of them was being filmed in June 2017 for an episode of The Grand Tour when Richard Hammond drove it off a Swiss hillside, setting off a reportedly five-day-long blaze.
Another survival miracle, it turns out, for both Hammond, who somehow escaped not just alive but without serious injury, and the company, which had been trying to secure further funding. Surprisingly, money arrived in even greater force after word of the crash spread. Rimac the company exploded—in a good way.
In 2018, Porsche bought a 10 percent stake in Rimac (and upped it in 2021); Hyundai possesses a 12 percent stake. Rimac now employs more than 1000 people. And it has shown that its latest creation, the Nevera, can get to 60 mph in less than two seconds. The Nevera is what Rimac really envisioned as he and his team constructed the Concept One. Indeed, in some ways, it exceeds what they imagined.
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In about 10 years’ time, Mate Rimac would go from a lone guy tinkering in a garage to part owner and CEO of one of the industry’s most storied brands.
But again: How? The list of accomplishments doesn’t explain this. After all, each of us has visions—albeit some more powerful and helpful than others. What turned a seemingly average 18-year-old petrolhead into a 33-year-old titan? What is the difference?
“Initially, it was for sure the naïveté,”says Adriano Mudri, the young GM designer whohelped with the original Concept One and is now Rimac’s head of design. Who else would think to build an electric hypercar? In reality, there were some others. But even when his own friends doubted him, Rimac believed it could be done. (“Speaking honestly, I was not a believer,” says Brkljačić, now head of strategic projects at the company.) He actually pursued the idea. “Many people promise, but not many people actually follow up,” Mudri says.
Naïveté may have also proved to be a technological advantage. Hypercar creator Christian von Koenigsegg, who has developed a friendship with Rimac beyond their collaborations, notes that Mate’s informal engineering background may have enabled him to pursue novel solutions. “We don’t have the academic engineering background but are more self-taught,” Koenigsegg explains.
“I even think this might be a prerequisite for what we do, as we are more unlimited in our thinking when it comes to technical solutions.” Mate also deeply believes that in the Internet age, anything can be learned.
While Mate Rimac ascends to global automotive prominence, construction of the Nevera continues in Croatia.
Naïveté can also mature into a form of bravery. Igor Pongrac, the former drone creator (who after nine years with Rimac has returned to designing tech for unmanned aerial vehicles, now in Abu Dhabi), recalls how in the early days, Rimac made choices that confused and even concerned those around him—all of whom were older. He had a talent for “choosing the optimal moment to act on some decision that was sometimes completely weird but paid off in the long run,” Pongrac writes via email. “We would try to talk him out of it.” Often they were urging him to be more cautious with company finances. But Rimac, not interested in enriching himself, reinvested the money he earned into the company, be it for tools or a better stand at the Geneva auto show. Time and again, the risks paid off.
Rimac also had a willful ignorance of how long endeavors should take. “Sometimes he would assign us impossible tasks with impossible deadlines,” Pongrac recalls. But the passion of the team, despite being underinformed and underfunded, would match the demands. (This practice would serve Rimac and his colleagues later. Lutz Meschke, deputy chairman and member of the finance board for Porsche, remembers testing their know-how in 2017. “We sent them an extremely tough task, one that many at Porsche were certain they would not be able to solve,” he explains. Rimac’s group was given a Porsche Panamera E-Hybrid—but no spec sand only three weeks to test the battery management and suggest improvements. “He not only understood the system,” Meschke recalls, “he also made it more powerful.”) Impossibility lost its meaning. The company grew emboldened. “We used to promise things [to collaborators] that we didn’t have,” Pongrac says. But they would find away to create them in time, endlessly reevaluating instead of giving up.
To celebrate the launch of the production Nevera model, Rimac sent the electric supercar up the hill at Goodwood in a cloud of tire smoke.
Still, doubt crept in, and Rimac worked to ward it off. Beyond crediting him with “big balls,” those around Rimac also frequently mention his ability to communicate his vision. Xavi Serra, head of racing at Cupra, remembers a 2017 meeting. Rimac had been challenged with creating a battery system for Cupra’s e-Racer, which aimed to become the first electric touring car in competition. The team seemed intimidated, but their boss convinced them this was another ambitious yet achievable goal posing as impossible. They found a way. “It’s a big asset, the way he explains and the way he moves the people,” Serra says.
Over time, this assurance and subsequent success created a sort of faith within the company. Inexperience alchemized by otherwise clichéd traits (passion, hard work, multitasking, a never-quit attitude) transformed into one of the most well-informed, specialized yet expansive forces in the hypercar world. These were not qualities one man alone could possess, but an entire collective could. And Rimac listened to what he made. He maintained his technical awareness, developed his business savvy, and, while he maintained final say, did something tremendously powerful: He deferred to the wisdom of others.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen visits Rimac headquarters.
Beneath the company’s accomplishments is also an unconventional strategy and structure. Its work as a Tier 1 supplier of novel technology to its competitors not only helps fund the construction of, say, the Nevera, but also informs its own creations.
“The beauty of doing stuff for other car companies is you’re essentially using their money to increase your own IP,” says Fraser Dunn, former chief engineer at Aston Martin. He worked with Rimac on developing the high-voltage battery and the infotainment system for the Valkyrie. Regardless of who technically owns what, the knowledge gained—not just about what worked but also what nearly worked yet could not be puzzled out before deadline—amounts to “an advantage to improve your own vehicles,” Dunn says. And the better Rimac’s cars are, the more appealing its technology is. Together this becomes something of a self-fueling machine.
Rimac can also operate beyond the constraints of the bureaucracy of larger corporations—and ingrained misconceptions about how long things take (sometimes triple the time Rimac needs) and how much they cost. The company also doesn’t need to concern itself so much with massive scale, which allows it to frame its priorities in a way major corporations can’t. “We don’t have to optimize for price. We can optimize for performance,” Mudri says. “This allows you to find solutions that you would not usually find in the rest of the industry."
Such is the freedom inherent in independence, which is what Rimac sought from the beginning, in the model of his idols. Over video chat, Horacio Pagani recalls a line he was lucky to read as an adolescent, something like “It’s better to be the head of the mouse than the tail of a lion.” As in, it’s better to be the brains of something small yet quick and nimble than swung around by a hulking larger entity—especially if the lion pays the mouse for its help.
There is another asset that Rimac possesses that others do not: his story. It seems to have an inherent meaning, be it instructive for how to build something in a restrictively, reflexively mechanized world or something more mystical. At times, people in Rimac’s orbit seem shocked that they believe in the magic. Mudri explained that the Rimac company was not simply a passive benefactor of timing, having devoted itself to electric vehicles right as governments began mandating the end of internal-combustion cars. “I wouldn’t say it’s by accident,” he says with a small laugh. “It’s destiny.” Not that it matters, really, the degree of belief. The outcomes do.
In early 2021, Rimac announced plans for a grand new campus in Croatia. Designed by a Croatian firm, the facility will serve as the company’s R&D and production base. It will also include a test track and a museum.
RIMAC AUTOMOBILI
And sure, years ago, when Rimac happened upon a stretch of land by a castle, he decided, against the odds, that he would build his company’s campus there. Now, somehow, ground has been broken. On a planned test track, employees will see the dream of the Nevera drifting in reality. The surrounding fenceless land is populated with wild animals ,which Rimac hopes might subtly persuade people to become vegans (he believes meat eating is poisoning the world). And Rimac is building it, as he has all of this, in Croatia, becoming a hero to many of its people. Such things are unfathomable—magical—or real because of a powerful man who struggles to fathom his power by buying a (rather nice) plot of land.
At an event announcing the creation of Bugatti Rimac, Porsche executives Lutz Meschke (left) and Oliver Blume shake hands as a beaming Mate Rimac looks on.
Outsiders have questioned the value of the other acquisition: Bugatti. The popular press celebrated that Volkswagen had removed a brand it considered a distraction, one with a history of losing money. (In 2013, analysts estimated that even though the Bugatti Veyron had a price of about $2.5 million, the cost to develop and produce it led to the company losing more than twice as much on every car sold.) Mate Rimac, the laid-back listener who now runs Bugatti, will stand in stark contrast to the late VW executive who purchased it decades ago, the oft-autocratic Ferdinand Piëch, grandson of the inventor of the Beetle and famed for his machinations and lavish spending. It also means a new mentality for Bugatti. “Bugatti always prided themselves on being a part of a larger OEM and piggybacking off that structure,” Christian von Koenigsegg writes in an email. “Now all extreme sports-car producers are more stand-alone than before, even though, of course, Porsche is still in the background of Rimac/Bugatti.” As for the Rimac team, they’re excited to have two tracks to test on rather than one. It won’t be the first time that one entity’s poison is another’s possibility.
Still, there are worries among the excitement. Horacio Pagani has been cautioning Rimac to be careful. “It’s scary because, of course, the expectation is always very high,” he says. “And in that case, you have to be able to satisfy the expectation.”One day in early September, Pagani woke up at 5 a.m. with a fresh worry. He wrote to Rimac, urging him to check with his lawyers that Bugatti’s past responsibilities (and lawsuits) would not become his own. Rimac replied to say that while he was on his honeymoon (which kept him from talking for this story), he checked with his lawyers, and all was well. Pagani was relieved.
Mudri says they work so quickly at Rimac that there is seldom celebration. “We don’t really have time for the ups because we have to resolve the downs,” he says. In the blur is the fact that, after all of this, they have only reached the beginning. The campus by the castle has not been finished. There is a battery-production rate to increase, more deadlines, more creations to craft. The decade ahead may prove wilder than the last. Indeed, Mate Rimac tells those closest to him, they are still in the first chapter.
At 33, Mate Rimac is now the CEO of Bugatti Rimac, which will eventually be headquartered at the Rimac campus near Zagreb. Porsche has a 45 percent stake in the new company.
