All Speed, No Sound

A young lad from Croatia decided to make electric cars cool, so he went ahead and built a hypercar. Now, there’s a version 2.0 in the wings and I’ve had a chance to visit corridors that will see it come together.

- Debabrata Sarkar

Tearing through the countryside in Croatia, with the cruise control set to keep pace with traffic around, I chance upon a large signboard marked Nikola Tesla. No, he has nothing to do with Tesla cars, but he did have plenty to do with inventing the concept of alternating current at the turn of the twentieth century. Tesla may have put his innovation to use in the US, but his hometown is only about 200km away from where Mate Rimac is changing the face of electric cars, with an all-electric hypercar, today.

But it isn’t just this incredibly elite club of hypercars that Rimac is after, although it does happen to be one of his favourite things to do. Rimac is about technologies and innovation first, who also happen to put it all together to build a hypercar that made more than one thousand horse power to begin with. The Concept_One broke cover in 2011, saw the light of day in 2016 and unlike other road cars, was pretty much the same as the show car. Priced at roughly a million US dollars, all eight examples that were produced have been sold. But, guess where the idea was born?