Rimac

Rimac is a Croatian electric-hypercar maker best known for the Nevera and for the battery and powertrain technology it supplies to other automakers. The company began in 2009 as a one-person garage project and grew into one of the most credible engineering names in the hypercar world.

Behind the brand

Mate Rimac founded the company in 2009, after the petrol engine in his own BMW E30 gave out and he converted the car to run on electric power. That project became the seed of a car company. He started the work in Sveta Nedelja, on the outskirts of Zagreb, where Rimac is still headquartered.

The setting was unlikely. Croatia had no car industry to lean on, no local supply chain, and no tradition of building hypercars, so Rimac had to build its own engineering base from scratch. That is why the brand has always led with engineering rather than heritage.

The cars

Rimac’s first production car was the Concept One. It appeared as a prototype in 2011, and Rimac went on to build eight examples, a tiny run that made the car rare from the start. The Concept One set the template the brand still follows: an electric hypercar designed from a clean sheet by a small team, not a conversion of an existing model.

The Nevera is the flagship, and the car most people mean when they talk about Rimac. It sits among the quickest-accelerating production cars in the world, with output among the highest of any road car. Headline figures vary from source to source, so the engineering behind them is the safer thing to point at. A sharper Nevera R variant exists, and every Nevera is built in strictly limited numbers that keep it in the multi-million-dollar tier. It earns a place on our list of the fastest cars.

The technology

Rimac’s most consequential work may not be the cars it sells. A sister company, Rimac Technology, supplies battery and drivetrain systems to other manufacturers, and the powertrain expertise developed for the Nevera now underpins cars from established marques. That supplier role makes Rimac matter well beyond its small production numbers. Building a complete electric hypercar from a clean sheet, then turning the underlying technology into a business, is a harder thing to fake than a spec sheet.

The Bugatti tie-up

Rimac’s car-making sits within Bugatti Rimac, a joint venture formed in 2021 in which the Rimac Group holds the majority stake and Porsche holds a minority stake. Rimac Automobili, Rimac Technology, and Bugatti Rimac are related but distinct, and the joint venture is a corporate structure rather than a merger of the two nameplates. The arrangement puts Rimac at the center of how legacy hypercar brands are electrifying, while Bugatti keeps its own name. Our Bugatti price list covers that side of the story.

Where Rimac sits

Rimac competes on engineering credibility rather than volume, building only a handful of cars a year. The Nevera belongs to the multi-million-dollar, strictly limited hypercar tier, alongside the most expensive cars in the world. In a segment full of storied badges, Rimac is the rare newcomer whose claim rests on proven technology. It started with a single converted BMW and now supplies the engineering that other makers reach for when they go electric.