Rimac Concept_One
Rimac

Concept_One

Rimac Concept_One: The Spark

Before the Nevera, there was the Concept_One. Before Rimac was a supplier to Bugatti, Porsche, and Hyundai, it was a startup in Zagreb, Croatia, operating from a repurposed chicken factory with a handful of young engineers and a founder who had destroyed his own car rebuilding it with electric motors. The Concept_One is where all of that began — and understanding it requires understanding Mate Rimac’s story.

Mate Rimac: The BMW E30 That Started Everything

Mate Rimac was born in 1988 in Livno, Bosnia, and grew up in Croatia. By his late teens, he was already building electronics and competing in robotics competitions. He acquired a 1984 BMW E30 as a teenager, intending to use it as a drift car. During a racing weekend, the engine seized. Rather than rebuild the petrol engine, Rimac made a decision that would change the automotive industry: he would replace it with an electric motor.

The conversion was simple by modern standards — an electric motor salvaged from a forklift, batteries from power tools — but the result was revelatory. The instant torque of the electric motor, available from zero RPM without the need to build up engine speed, made the converted E30 dramatically faster than it had been with its petrol engine. Rimac realized that electric motors didn’t just match petrol engines in certain performance metrics; in the metrics that matter most for acceleration, they were fundamentally superior.

He decided to build the world’s first electric hypercar.

Building a Company at 21

Rimac Automobili was founded in 2009 with essentially no external capital. Mate Rimac, aged 21, used his own savings and money from selling his personal electronics projects to start the company. Early operations were conducted in an industrial space outside Zagreb with a team of fewer than ten people, most of them young engineers and technicians drawn from Croatian universities and the local automotive supply industry.

The Concept_One was developed over approximately three years, with Rimac simultaneously developing the company’s capabilities in battery management, electric motor design, power electronics, and software. The car that debuted at the Frankfurt Motor Show in 2011 (as a concept) and entered limited production in 2013 was the product of an engineering team working at the limits of what was possible with limited resources.

Only 8 units were ever built. Each was essentially hand-assembled, with significant variation between examples as the engineering team incorporated lessons from testing and customer feedback. The Concept_One was not a mass-market product — it was a demonstration of what Mate Rimac believed was possible, intended as much to attract investors and technology partners as to generate revenue.

Torque Vectoring: Inventing the Future

The Concept_One’s most important contribution to automotive technology was not its speed — though it was extraordinary — but its pioneering of Rimac All-Wheel Torque Vectoring (R-AWTV).

This system used four independent electric motors — one at each wheel — each connected to a single-speed reduction gearbox and a bespoke power electronics unit that could control power delivery with millisecond precision. The system gave the Concept_One capabilities that no petrol-powered car could approach:

Four-Wheel Independence: Each wheel could receive any amount of power from zero to maximum, independently of the others. In a conventional all-wheel-drive petrol car, power is distributed through mechanical differentials that have inherent limitations — they can only move power from faster-spinning wheels to slower ones, within mechanical constraints. The Concept_One’s system could apply maximum power to any individual wheel or combination of wheels at any moment.

Rear Gearboxes: Each rear motor was fitted with a two-speed dual-clutch gearbox — an unusual and sophisticated arrangement that allowed the rear motors to provide both excellent acceleration torque from standstill (first gear, high torque multiplication) and efficient high-speed operation (second gear, lower multiplication, higher speed). The front motors used simpler single-speed gearboxes.

Torque Vectoring in Practice: In normal driving, the R-AWTV system distributed torque to maximize traction and minimize wheelspin. But the system could also be tuned to create specific handling behaviors:

  • Understeer mode: More torque to the front wheels, creating front-axle-dominant behavior.
  • Oversteer mode: More torque to the rear wheels and specifically to the outside rear wheel, creating rear-axle-dominant behavior — controllable drifts.
  • Neutral handling: Torque distributed to balance lateral load transfer, maximizing grip.

This level of real-time chassis control was simply unavailable to engineers working with conventional mechanical differentials and petrol engines. The Concept_One didn’t just demonstrate that an EV could be fast — it demonstrated that EVs could be more dynamically sophisticated than any petrol car.

The Battery: 90 kWh in 2013

The Concept_One’s battery pack contained 90 kWh of energy — a figure that sounds unremarkable in 2024, when family SUVs routinely have 100 kWh batteries, but was extraordinary in 2013. Rimac’s engineering team developed their own battery management system from scratch, controlling cell temperature, state of charge, and discharge rate throughout the pack with a precision that commercial units available at the time could not match.

The 90 kWh battery provided the Concept_One with approximately 500 km of theoretical range under gentle driving — not that any owner would drive it gently. Under track conditions, range dropped to perhaps 70–80 km per charge, but the sustained performance available during that period was extraordinary: 1,224 hp available continuously, without the thermal limits that turbochargers and petrol engines impose.

The Numbers: 2013 Benchmarks

When the Concept_One was delivered to its first customers in 2013, its performance figures were extraordinary:

  • Power: 1,224 hp (approximately 913 kW)
  • Torque: 1,600 Nm — a figure that no petrol engine of manageable displacement could approach
  • 0–100 km/h: 2.5 seconds
  • 0–200 km/h: 6.2 seconds
  • Top Speed: 355 km/h (claimed)

These figures competed with the Ferrari LaFerrari and the McLaren P1 — both of which used sophisticated hybrid systems combining petrol engines with electric motors and cost substantially more than the Concept_One.

The Hammond Crash: A Turning Point

The Concept_One became globally famous for a reason Rimac had not anticipated. In 2017, while filming an episode of The Grand Tour — the Amazon motoring series featuring former Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May — Richard Hammond crashed a Concept_One during a hillclimb event in Hemberg, Switzerland.

The sequence of events: Hammond carried too much speed into a corner at the top of the hillclimb, the car understeered off the road, and it rolled down the hillside multiple times. The car came to rest on its roof.

The Fire: After the crash, the damaged battery pack began to experience thermal runaway — a chain reaction in which lithium-ion cells heat up, release electrolyte vapor, which ignites, further heating surrounding cells. The fire burned for days despite extensive efforts by the fire department, because the lithium-ion cells in the battery pack contained sufficient energy to sustain combustion for an extended period.

Hammond survived, suffering a fractured knee and minor burns. The carbon fiber monocoque of the Concept_One performed exactly as designed in the crash itself — the survival cell maintained its structural integrity through multiple rollovers, protecting the occupant. The fire, however, presented challenges for which conventional firefighting techniques were inadequate.

The Engineering Response: Rimac’s team analyzed the crash data in detail. The information gathered about how the battery behaved during thermal runaway, how the fire spread through the pack, and what could be done structurally and chemically to contain it was directly incorporated into the design of the Nevera’s battery system. The Hammond crash was a public relations catastrophe but an engineering education — and Rimac used it.

Legacy: The Ancestor of Everything

Without the Rimac Concept_One, the electric hypercar market as it exists today would not exist in its current form. The car demonstrated several things that the industry had assumed were impossible or impractical:

EVs can be emotionally engaging: The Concept_One’s handling, its immediacy of response, and its ability to drift and slide under torque vectoring control demonstrated that electric cars could be viscerally exciting rather than merely fast in a straight line.

EVs can be genuinely fast, not just fast on paper: The Concept_One matched and exceeded petrol-hybrid hypercars in real-world performance metrics at a time when this was considered implausible.

Independent startups can challenge established manufacturers: Rimac’s success attracted investment from Porsche, Hyundai, and eventually led to the acquisition of Bugatti — the ultimate legacy of a company that started with a young man’s converted BMW E30.

The Nevera, the Pininfarina Battista, and the Bugatti Tourbillon all owe their existence to the Concept_One. It is the Model T of the electric hypercar age — not because it was the best or the most sophisticated, but because it proved the concept and started everything that followed.