Flat-out in the Rimac Nevera

The reason Rimac has cash is that the major car companies have been hammering on 33-year-old Mate Rimac’s door since he showed his Concept One supercar at Frankfurt in 2011. Mate is perhaps more ‘one of us’ than Elon Musk, to whom he is occasionally compared. He comes from a family of Bosnian Croat migrant workers, and started his journey to where he is today when, aged 20, he tore the blown engine from his beaten up E30 325i and replaced it with an electric motor from a forklift.

He pulled that out too, improved it, and hasn’t stopped improving electric powertrains since. Within three years he’d built the Concept One, and brought a bunch of OEMs more used to dealing with vast suppliers like Bosch to a tiny nation with no history of car-making to see if this kid really could give them the short-cut they needed to very high-performance electric powertrains.

It turns out he could. Porsche and Hyundai not only commissioned projects but invested in the company. Rimac is open about being a supplier of hybrid components to Aston Martin and Koenigsegg among others, and that the Pininfarina Battista is basically a Nevera in an Italian suit. But his company is about to get much bigger. It now has a bunch of contracts in place to supply components or complete powertrains for high-performance derivatives of EVs from more mainstream brands, to be made in volumes of up to 100,000 per year. Your next car might not be a Nevera, but it may well be powered by Rimac.

The most striking measure of how seriously the big players take Rimac is that Volkswagen will soon announce it is handing a majority stake in Bugatti to Mate in return for him engineering the devastating electric powertrains the marque will need in the electric era. It doesn’t want to commit the budget and engineering resource to do it itself, even assuming it can. The other option would be to shutter Bugatti.

So that’s why the Nevera deserves your attention: it’s simply the latest and best thinking from a young company old players take very seriously indeed, though Mate’s thinking iterates so rapidly that future Bugattis or more mainstream EVs we can all afford are unlikely to share much with this car.

It’s also very far from a one-trick pony. Don’t be distracted by the headline numbers: Mate intended this car to be a usable grand tourer which just happens to be the quickest thing on the road. The spec is too lengthy to detail here, but in addition to a combined 1887bhp and 1696lb ft from the motors on each wheel, there’s also the highest capacity battery ever fitted to a car at 120kWh, and the largest, stiffest carbon fibre monocoque in the car industry, which requires 70,000Nm of torque to deflect by one degree.

Much of the carbon body is articulated by an active aero package that will even funnel your tyre smoke into the optimal plume in drift mode. There’s an artificial intelligence driver coach, which will figure out the best line around a track and even drive you on a demo lap, then coach you. There is endless data too, both in the cabin and in the F1-level telemetry you can access afterwards in the app.

But anyway, those numbers. With the launch control not quite finalised, I covered the standing quarter-mile in 8.7 seconds at 160mph. The Chiron needs 9.4 seconds. Once complete (the car I drove was a 95 per cent finished pre-production prototype; we’re hoping to drive a finished car soon, at which point we’ll deliver a final verdict and a Ti rating) Mate says it will do 60mph in 1.85sec, 100mph in 4.3sec and the quarter in 8.6sec. That’s nearly a second faster than the Chiron: an eternity in these matters. Top speed will be 258mph, though only for about five minutes.

And yes, it feels just as insane as those numbers suggest. Once you’ve told the car you want to launch by engaging the brake and pressing the throttle all the way in, all that’s required of you is to release the brake, keep the thing in a straight line and hold your toe in. But even that feels a bit much, for both physiological and psychological reasons. The experience is entirely non-automotive. You feel like Colonel John Stapp strapping himself into one of his rocket-powered sleds to test the effects of acceleration and deceleration, wondering why you’ve done this voluntarily.

The acceleration is unanswerable but not necessarily pleasant. It is genuinely quite frightening and disorientating, and for once that’s not motoring journalist hyperbole. But please never again tell me that electric cars aren’t exciting or impressive. I did it five times, and what stands out among my fractured memories is the scream of the electric motors as 1.4 megawatts coursed through them, and the rip and tear of tyres on the concrete as the torque vectoring system matched the torque from each motor to the available grip, keeping them constantly on the brink of spinning up.

Other than its instant torque, the precision with which an EV can do this is perhaps its greatest straight-line advantage, and produces the weird effect of the rate of acceleration seeming to increase with speed.

By now, a few of you will be screaming at your devices that such performance is unusable on the public road. True, but that’s not the point. The Nevera exemplifies the difference between excessive and unlimited. You simply decide how much of that power is responsible to deploy, and it’s there. The three-stage throttle map makes it as docile to drive in town as a Leaf, and the chassis, whose tuning isn’t quite finished, is already a remarkable achievement given the power and mass (2150kg) it has to contain. It mostly rides well, keeps a tight check on the roll, heave and understeer you might expect in such a heavy car, and steers quickly and faithfully, if with little feel.

But it’s there mainly in the service of that powertrain. The Nevera is no one-trick pony, but the grunt is the main event. Straight-line speed is by no means the most important measure of a car. Of all the reasons to give the Nevera your attention, though, the most significant is probably this: that it marks the moment the quickest electric car completely and demonstrably outpaced the quickest petrol car, never for petrol to recover.