Rimac Verne
WHAT MATE RIMAC DID NEXT
…and it might not be what you’d expect
Few car company bosses can have launched such wildly differing cars within a week. On June 20, Mate Rimac pulled the covers from the sixteen-cylinder, 1775bhp, £3.2m hybrid Bugatti Tourbillon at the marque’s chateau in eastern France. Just six days later, amidst the cranes and construction traffic at his new Rimac campus on the outskirts of Zagreb he revealed his new Verne autonomous ride-hailing service, and the compact electric car which will transport you.
But there are few car company bosses like the 36 year old Mate. His Rimac Nevera electric hypercar and his controlling stake in Bugatti – gifted to him by VW in return for access to his high-performance electric drive tech – may make the headlines, but the business he has built supplying that tech to manufacturers such as Porsche, BMW and Aston Martin is far more significant. He’s also working on static energy storage solutions – massive batteries, essentially, which will store renewable energy until it is needed: a venture which some think might even eclipse his automotive efforts.
Verne is Mate’s latest start-up and aims to take on Google’s Waymo, Tesla’s robotaxi service which will be launched in August, and a flurry of others. Terrifying opposition, but that hasn’t fazed Mate before. Zagreb gets Verne first, in 2026, with Manchester likely to be next, a further nine European and Middle Eastern cities signed up, and at least 30 more in advanced negotiations.
Mate founded Verne with friends and long-time collaborators Marko Pejković, now the CEO, and Adriano Mudri, the designer of Nevera and now Chief Design Officer, naming it after the French novelist whose work often focussed on extraordinary journeys. The Rimac Group owns 47 per cent of Verne, with investors including Hyundai and Saudi Arabia the rest.
With no need for a steering wheel, pedals or even a windscreen, the Verne car could have been made wildly different to anything else on the road. But instead Mudri has created a pretty but reasonably conventional-looking coupe with twin sliding doors designed to minimise disruption to traffic.
There are plenty of clues to its real nature though. There’s a windscreen but no wipers or door mirrors, and the bodywork subtly houses the cameras, radar and lidar which allow it to drive itself. Although Mate is a firm believer in doing almost everything in-house and has developed driver assistance systems in the past, the self-driving tech in the Verne car is supplied by Intel-owned Israeli firm Mobileye.
Inside there are only two seats, arranged side-by-side and facing forward, as in a conventional car. Verne’s data shows that 90 per cent of ride-hailing trips carry only one or two riders, and Mudri wanted to create a cabin with ‘Rolls-Royce’ levels of space. The business-class style seats recline with extending support for your legs. There are no hidden compartments in which to lose your phone, and even with your legs stretched right out there’s still stowage space for bags you don’t want to place in the boot. The cabin feels incredibly spacious, lit from above by the circular ‘halo’ sunroof through which you can admire the architecture of the city you’re passing through, freed of the need to keep your eyes on the road.
Ahead of you is a 43-inch widescreen controlled by a touchscreen between the seats, and you’re surrounded by a 17-speaker audio system. The entertainment, temperature, seating position and even the scent can be configured to your preferences before ‘your’ car arrives. The doors will open and close automatically, but you decide when to start the ride. A ‘keep’ function will allow you to run into a shop while your car waits outside.
Underneath, there’s an electric motor on the rear axle and a 60kWh LFP battery sufficient for 14 hours of typical use. Neither is made by Rimac, but the company will build the cars itself at a new factory in the outskirts of Zagreb. Mate estimates that a few hundred cars could service a city the size of Zagreb but that a thousand would be better. The new plant will be able to produce up to 6000 each year.
Each city served by Verne will have at least one ‘mothership’ building to which the cars will return to be cleaned and charged. Mate and his investors will wholly own each city’s operation at first, but are open to franchising the service in future. Verne will offer pay-as-you-go and subscription options, and claims it will be competitive on cost with human-driven ride-hailing services, despite offering a ‘premium’ experience.
The skateboard chassis means that a whole range of body styles could eventually be offered. “There should be many versions,” Mate tells us. “This is the initial one, but we can make one that caters for disabled people, or a four-seater, or maybe one day an intercity car where you can sleep for a couple of hours. But first we need to get this one to work, and roll it out.”
But can Rimac really succeed where so many huge tech companies have failed, and others still struggle? “Executing unreasonable things is what makes Rimac special,” says Anthony Sheriff, the Rimac chairman and former McLaren boss. “I’ve had the privilege of following this journey for a decade now, and what these guys have built from a very unlikely starting point is remarkable. They do things which much larger organisations struggle with because they don’t over-analyse: they just get on with it.”
“It’s been quite the week for Bugatti-Rimac with the launch of the Tourbillon and this car. But I think in 30 years time, people will look back on this event as more significant in the history of motoring.”