Bugatti is the jewel in Volkswagen's crown. This 33-year-old is taking it over
New York (CNN Business)Bugatti, the French manufacturer of $3 million supercars, is over a century old. But now it faces what may be the most difficult maneuver it has ever had to carry out: transitioning to an electric future.
But enormous engines fueled by petroleum products are no longer technological wonders. They're old school. And in 2021, Bugatti needs to finally enter the age of electric vehicles.
Mate Rimac poses next to his "Concept One" supercar model at his factory and showroom in Sveta Nedelja, Croatia, on February 17, 2016.
Enter Mate Rimac, who in 2009 founded Rimac Automoblili, a Croatian startup making the 1,900 horsepower Rimac Nevera electric supercar. The genius of high-wattage performance had already grabbed headlines fresh out of high school and he's attracted the industry's attention ever since.
In July, Bugatti merged with Rimac Automobili — creating Bugatti-Rimac, and transferring majority ownership of VW's luxury performance icon from one of the world's largest automakers to a small startup in the process.
'Why was nobody using [this] to make cars fun and exciting?'
For an auto industry CEO, 33-year-old Rimac is on the youthful side, and he looks even younger thanks to his dark brown hair and beard. (His first name is pronounced like "matzoh" without the Z — Maht-teh — while his last name, and the company's, is pronounced Ree-mahts with a slightly rolled R.)
Rimac has had an incredible and rapid journey to such a vaunted position. It began when Rimac blew up the engine in a BMW while racing the car in his late teens: Instead of just fixing it, he decided to turn the BMW into an electric race car.
This was long before Tesla was selling high-performance family sedans, let alone becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world. By then, Rimac's family had left what was then Yugoslavia — today the place he was born is in the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina — and had spent about a decade in Germany before returning to the former Yugoslavia. This time, the family lived in the newly independent nation of Croatia.
"Because I was in Croatia, I read a lot about Nikola Tesla, who was also born in Croatia. Nikola Tesla had invented the electric motor 160 years ago that we use now everywhere and I was wondering," he said, "this perfect machine that Nikola Tesla has invented, why was nobody using it to make cars fun and exciting?"
Rimac delivers a speech beside a Rimac Nevera electric supercar outside the company's Croatian factory in in July.
His electric BMW, dubbed the Green Monster, went on to set records and garner media attention. But Rimac quickly realized putting electric motors into old cars wasn't a viable business for the long term. Instead, he decided he would engineer his own high-performance electric cars from the outset.
Rimac was just out of high school at the time. He attended VERN' University of Applied Science in Zagreb but never graduated.
"I had to learn everything from scratch, which was pretty difficult here without mentors and the supporting industry," he said. "Lots I had to learn the hard way."
Rimac didn't have big investors to bankroll his idea, so while he and his first employees worked on that electric supercar, he also took on projects from established companies. Various automakers were looking to create electric and hybrid cars, and Rimac's clear understanding of the technology was valuable to them.
That part of the business — selling EV technologies to other firms — became the firm's greatest source of actual income and was the reason Rimac Automobili was profitable almost from the start, Rimac says.
Engineers work on car body parts at Rimac's factory in Sveta Nedelji in 2016.
Now that line of work has been spun off into a separate company he also runs, called Rimac Technology. That firm will continue developing new electric vehicle technologies for other automakers.
"First, it was companies you didn't hear about," he said, "and then starting to work for small carmakers like Koenigsegg, and then Aston Martin, and then to the bigger ones like Renault."
Actually, most consumers might not have heard of Koenigsegg, either, but the Swedish maker of multi-million-dollar gasoline-fueled supercars is considered another bold innovator. And its founder and CEO, Christian von Koenigsegg, has been a mentor to Mate Rimac, as well as a Rimac customer.
"I met Mate when he came to the Geneva Motor Show as a 17-year-old and asked me, 'I want to build cars. I want to build electric cars. How do I do it?" Koenigsegg said. "So I kind of became his mentor."
The relationship continues today and the two speak regularly, Rimac said.
Two major automakers, Hyundai and Porsche, became big investors in Rimac Automobili. Neither would discuss their work with Rimac with CNN Business. Porsche, though, was instrumental in bringing together RImac and Porsche's sister brand Bugatti. Porsche now owns 45% of Bugatti-Rimac.
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