Rimac teams up with Hyundai and Kia to build electric sportscars

May 14, 2019

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Mate Rimac shakes hands with Hyundai Motor Group Executive Vice Chairman Euisun Chung on an €80-million deal to produce high performance electric vehicles

Rimac

Mate Rimac shakes hands with Hyundai Motor Group Executive Vice Chairman Euisun Chung on an €80-million deal to produce high performance electric vehicles

Rimac

Rimac, maker of some of the most extreme electric sports cars the planet has ever seen, is about to get its fingers into the mass market pie through a US$90 million investment from Korean automakers Hyundai and Kia.

It'll be a far cry from building short-run 2,000-horsepower tire shredders like the eye-popping C_Two, but the Croatian hypercar company will bring its electric expertise to the masses thanks to a new partnership announced today.

Hyundai Motor Group, which owns Hyundai as well as Kia, wants to bring some seriously sporty electric and fuel cell options to the table under its N brand high performance division, and Rimac sees this new €80-million (approx. US$90-million) investment partnership as an opportunity to cement itself as a tier-one supplier of electrification components across the auto industry.

"Rimac is an innovative company with outstanding capabilities in high-performance electric vehicles," says Euisun Chung, Executive Vice Chairman of Hyundai Motor Group. "Its startup roots and abundant experience collaborating with automakers combined with technological prowess makes Rimac the ideal partner for us. We look forward to collaborating with Rimac on our road to Clean Mobility."

We look forward to seeing the first fruits of this alliance as well, which are slated to be two high-performance electric vehicles that are due by 2020.

Source: Rimac

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Loz Blain

Loz leads the New Atlas team as Editorial Director, after nearly two decades as one of our most versatile writers. He's also proven himself as a photographer, videographer, presenter, producer and podcast engineer. A graduate in Psychology, former business analyst and touring musician, he's covered just about everything for New Atlas, concentrating lately on clean energy, AI, humanoid robotics, next-gen aircraft, and the odd bit of music, motorcycles and automotive.

2 comments

Daishi May 14, 2019 08:10 AM

I read that Rimac is going to make 150 C_Two's. It has a base price of $2.1 million and buyers on average spent $614k in options and they are expected to ship in 2020. Interestingly enough the new Tesla Roadster specs match or beat the C_Two with a base price of $200k. For the price of just the options on the C_Two you can buy 3 Roadsters that almost match the specs (1.9 0-60, 8.8 1/4 mile, >250 MPH top speed, 620 mile range). Rimac has a custom infotainment system for the C_Two with graphics and telemetry data from the car and they are working on autonomy. At $2.7 million/car I suppose there is some room for R&D but maybe the lesson for Tesla here is that there is demand to sell ultra expensive vehicles for those price ranges in limited volume to the kinds of people who buy Bugatti's (the average Bugatti owner has 84 cars). I don't think companies like Bugatti make much actual profit selling really low volume hypercars but there is a benefit to sharing some R&D or potentially helping fund supercharging infrastructure.

Martin Winlow May 14, 2019 10:52 AM

I'm delighted for Mr Rimac - he has been at the forefront of EVs for as long as I have been interested in them (10 years or so) and has clearly been working very had at them all these years.
However, what the planet needs right now are affordable small EVs, not yet more utterly unattainable 'supercars' that are no more relevant today than ICE ones!