Rimac Nevera

Adriano Mudri drew the exterior, and the brief was aerodynamic before it was anything else. The surfacing is all channel and duct, the doors are butterflies, and the car reads lower and wider than its 1,208 mm height and 1,986 mm width suggest, because there is no engine bay to package and the mass sits in the floor. What lifts it above competent is the detail nobody notices until it is pointed out. Sculpted into the aerodynamic bodywork on each door is the shape of a necktie. Rimac chief program engineer Matija Renić explained it at the car's American debut: Croatian soldiers arriving in France in 1680 wore wide bands of silk and lace at the collar, the French named the garment after them, and cravat is a corruption of Croat. The car itself is named for the sudden lightning storms that come off the Adriatic, and interior plates name Zagreb as its birthplace. That is three pieces of national identity built into a car with no badge history to lean on, which is precisely the problem a new marque has and a neat answer to it.

There is no racing record, and the reason is structural rather than a want of ambition. Nothing in international motorsport has a class for a 2,300 kg, 1,914 PS road-legal electric car: Formula E runs a spec chassis, GT racing is written around combustion balance-of-performance tables, and endurance rules have no category the Nevera could be homologated into without being rebuilt into a different vehicle. What Rimac did instead was chase timed records, which is the discipline the car actually suits. Papenburg for top speed, 412 km/h in November 2022. Papenburg again on 17 May 2023 for 23 acceleration and braking records in one day. Goodwood in July 2023, fastest production EV up the hill at 49.32 seconds. The Nürburgring on 18 August 2023, 7:05.298 with Martin Kodrić driving, still the production EV benchmark. Then July 2025, when the Nevera R took 24 more records at Papenburg including 0 to 400 to 0 km/h in 25.79 seconds. Rimac's competition history is written in stopwatches rather than trophies, and given how many of those marks came off Koenigsegg, it counts.

The Nevera carries a fire extinguisher in the back, held down by a leather strap embossed with the words in case of hill climb, extinguish fire. It is a joke about Richard Hammond, who crashed a Rimac Concept One during a hill climb, watched it burn, and walked away with a broken leg. That a company would build the joke into a 2.4 million dollar car says something about how Rimac wanted to be seen: unbothered, and confident enough to name the worst day in its history out loud. The rest of the car's public life has been reviews rather than films. Car and Driver called it the moment a battery-powered car toppled the Bugatti Chiron, and suggested the internal combustion engine may never catch up. Top Gear scored a pre-production car nine out of ten. Nico Rosberg took delivery of car number one in August 2022. And the reverse record has done more for the car's fame than any of the forward ones, because 171 mph backwards is the kind of fact that escapes the car world entirely and turns up in conversations that have nothing to do with cars.

Owning one is closer to owning a piece of consumer electronics with a chassis attached than anything at this price has been before, and that cuts both ways. The good part is that there is very little to go wrong in the traditional sense. No engine, no gearbox, no clutch, no exhaust, no oil. What wears is tyres, brake pads and suspension bushes, and 2,300 kg makes short work of the first two if you use the car as intended. The part that needs thought is the battery. It is a 120 kWh pack of Rimac's own design and, financially speaking, it is the car. Charging behaviour matters, storage state of charge matters, and nobody yet has ten years of data on what a pack like this does over that time. Software is the other adjustment. Drive modes, torque vectoring and the regenerative braking blend all update, and a car that has missed updates behaves differently from one that has not. None of it is difficult. It is simply a different set of habits from the ones hypercar owners have spent thirty years learning.