Driving an electric hypercar

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the time I travelled to Croatia to meet Mate Rimac and drive his all-electric hypercar, the Concept One. I promised I would cover the car itself in more detail, not least because even now, four years down the road (to the day, in fact), it remains every bit as relevant to the future of the supercar sector.

Or, at the very least, the Concept One hasn’t yet been superseded by a newer, cleverer EV hypercar. We know the Rimac C Two and its sister car, the Automobili Pininfarina Battista, as well as the Lotus Evija, are well on their way, but all three remain tantalisingly just over the horizon. So the Concept One is still the benchmark hyper-EV (along with, you could argue, the Nio EP9).

What do you suppose happens when designers rather than engineers are allowed to determine a car’s exterior dimensions? That’s exactly what Mate Rimac allowed to happen in the very early days of the Concept One’s gestation, a move he acknowledged during my trip to Croatia to be a mistake. How so? Designers abhor anything that spoils the purity of the lines they sketch, even if what spoils those lines is the need to occupy passengers. They’d do without a driver and passenger altogether if they could get away with it.