"THE Concept One it was called that because it was just a learning project. We never intended to sell it.” These are the words of Kreso Coric, sales director of Rimac, the small Croatian company focused on providing electrical solutions for the automotive industry, having already as clients Koenigsegg or Aston Martin.
However, its fate would be dramatically and mediatically altered after Richard Hammond, formerly of Top Gear and one of the three presenters of The Grand Tour, has run afoul of Concept One — Rimac's first electric hypersport — on the ramp in Hemberg, Switzerland, on June 10 of last year. The car overturned a few times, caught fire, but Hammond managed to get out of the car in time, despite being injured, with a fractured knee.
But bad publicity doesn't exist, right? Kreso Coric, in an interview with Autocar, can only agree, without any doubt, referring that the Hammond accident “was the best marketing ever”, and quite profitable, selling, on the very day of the accident, three Concept Ones.
However, despite being "lucky", Coric also says it was "scary and serious and could have ended in a different way, and we could have all ended up needing a new job".
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Rimac, hypersports brand?
Only eight Concept Ones were built, but at the last Geneva Motor Show we got to know the C_Two — the name will be different after the presentation of the final model — and it brings much more ambitious goals, which will cement Rimac as a builder of hypersports and not just as a specialized supplier of components for electrics — batteries, engines and gearboxes.The Rimac C_Two, despite the price per unit amounting to more than 1.7 million euros — with Rimac recording, on average, the addition of 491,000 euros in options (!) —, saw demand exceed all expectations, with the production of the 150 units foreseen already practically all allocated.
Production, however, will only start in 2020, with the Rimac C_Two and is still under development. The first “test mules” will be completed in the second half of this year, and by 2019, 18 prototypes will be built.
Less than 2.0s up to 100 km/h
The promised specs are amazing: 1914 hp of power, 2300 Nm of torque, 1.95s from 0-100 km/h, 11.8s up to 300 km/h and a top speed of… 412 km/h . Undoubtedly, numbers typical of a hypersport.
The Rimac C_Two features four electric motors and four gearboxes — single-speed front wheels and two-speed rear wheels. It was the solution found by Rimac to go from 2.0s from 0 to 100 km/h, which was not initially planned, but after the bombastic announcement of the Tesla Roadster that it could do this — as yet unproven — the Croatian builder decided to further develop C_Two to achieve it. Kreso Coric:
We never considered downloading from 2.0s. Then the Tesla Roadster came up with those crazy numbers they never checked. We don't like to be compared to Tesla, because they're in a different category, but it's a matter of mentality, because he's electric like us.
Because of all the hype surrounding Tesla, Mate Rimac really challenged our engineers. We wanted to beat that result, but we didn't want to reveal it until we were sure it would be possible to achieve it.