Rimac explained to a few thousand people out of 8,000 attendees at the conference how Rimac managed to get from his garage to become a 400 people company. Croatia is not really well known for its incubator scene and young Mate had to fight with the dragons to get where he is today. Even today, Croatia doesn’t have a venture capital fund. Mate, like yours truly, was born in Bosnia, but chose to make his business in the bit more business friendly and EU member Croatia, where he ended up growing up.

To be honest, even some financially advanced countries including Austria, don’t really understand the venture capital,and startup scene. Even Austria only started considering giving these small startup companies capital just a few years ago.  

200 out of 400 employers are engineers

Rimac also mentioned that out of 400 employees more than 200 are engineers and that his Concept one is one of the fastest Hypercars around. His Concept C_TWO car announced in Geneva should be able to get from 0 to 60 MPH in 1,85 sec, has 1914 horsepower (1408 KW), a top speed of 412 KM/h (258 MPH), and motor torque of 2300 Nm.

The automotive industry didn’t help his efforts to become a car manufacturer as they didn’t let his small startup have access to key technologies including lights or even wipers. The traditional way the automotive industry works means that they want you to pay a few million to get access to the latest generation technology. Since Rimac Automobili didn’t have that money, it had to design most parts of the car from scratch. This according to Mate, helped the company in the long run. He also mentioned that it is making money working with some key OEMs and helping them design the power train and other parts of electric vehicles. He could not mention three key partners due to NDAs but he did reveal that Aston Martin, Koenigsegg, Seat, Jaguar, Renault, and Roborace are active OEM partners

No mainstream car

Mate Rimac confirmed to a few thousand attendees at We Are Developers 2018 in Vienna that the company is not working on mainstream cars and that it is unrealistic to expect to see one in the short term. He, of course, mentioned Tesla and that despite the fact that it got billions in venture capital is still struggling to make the Tesla 3. Rimac said that his company is really far from the mainstream car dream.

He mentioned that he doesn’t want to compete with OEMs who are funding his dream Concept C_two Hyper car. Even Jeremy Clarkson said that he became a believer in electric hyper cars after driving the Concept One car. Here at Fudzilla we believe that these rich man toys are an important step in the future of automotive, but some technologies such as drive coaching approach to ADAS (self driving) might be an important feature for these super/hyper cars in the future and save people who think they know how to drive from dying or killing others in the process.