Tesla is not the only innovator in the manufacturing of electric vehicles. The Croatian company Rimac is building the supercars of the future. Maybe they are not for everybody’s budget, but they are certainly a neat design with extraordinary machinery.
The Rimac mindset is to create new vehicles from scratch. They are not sourcing car parts from the big manufacturers, where everybody buys. They make their own parts and they do their own conception in-house. One great ideas of theirs was to replace the primary engine that drives all wheels centrally, with decentralized engines directly driving one dedicated wheel, all controlled by the central computer of the vehicle.
Rimac is a relatively young company, being founded in 2011, which allows them to follow a very agile design and prototyping workflow. A designer might be drawing a new idea down today, and finds that new part being already made on the next day. This would never be possible in a big established automotive manufacturing company.
Also you have to take notice on the fact, that thus far Rimac has not yet been invested in by a venture capitalist or another company. They are doing their thing and CEO Mate Rimac prefers to stay in control of where his company is going. In order to achieve that, they also had to undergo some hardships like being unable to pay out salary to staff for a month or so back in early days of the company.
However the employees never gave up and they all work hard to make the Rimac work out. As Croatia has no actual automotive industry, all these people would otherwise need to work abroad or have no jobs at all. As they have a lot of hardware and software innovation, they are also able to sell particular modules to other manufacturers and make profit that way too.
The Rimac cars are made to run very fast. It’s more likely that they will find a place in sport racing, rather than urban stop’n’go driving. Next to the supercars Concept_One (1088 hp, 355 km/h top speed) and Concept_S (1384 hp, 365 km/h top speed), they are also working on electric bicycles. A trend absolutely overlooked by the competition.
I hope they will succeed in becoming a larger company with a lot of orders, without losing their agility and passion for what they do. The designs are fantastic and the hardware innovation is top notch!
YouTube: The Story Behind The Concept_One
Photo credit: Rimac
