“SQUEEZE THE THROTTLE... THE RIMAC JUST WARPS”
equivalent to 1,888bhp and 1,741lb ft of torque. A pair of singlespeed gearboxes are connected to the front and rear wheels. The Nevera has a range of 340 miles WLTP, and hooked up to a 500kW charger (when they actually exist for public consumption) takes 19 minutes to go from zero to an 80 per cent state of charge.
Yet there’s no future shock to the Nevera in everyday use. The drive controller is a rotary dial to the left of the steering wheel that you push to wake everything up, then scroll through P, R, N and D. Rimac is still finessing the haptics and there’s work to be done optimising its action. We bimble through town using a tiny fraction of the available firepower, drawing attention from the locals and a handful of speedy selfies. A rather rotund older lady remains wholly focused on her early morning ice cream. A man nearby cradles a beer with a similar fondness.
The road to the mainland ferry is a smoothly surfaced joy, a looping pasta spiral through that other-worldly landscape punctuated by a couple of deeply tempting straights. Enough of the bimble. Squeeze the Nevera’s throttle and the resulting torrent of energy is like lava erupting from a volcano. Even a big multi-cylindered combustion engine takes a beat or two to get its act together but the Rimac just warps forward. That idea of ‘thinking’ your indicators on and off: well this is thought or intention instantly made real.
Let’s just explode a myth here, though: fast cars aren’t all about simply going fast. The how, why and what happens along the way is what colours in the space between. The Nevera’s fully electric steering is well calibrated and allows you to pour the car in and out of corners with a linear motion. It’s not overflowing with natural feel but then ‘feel’ is a dark art these days. There are seven drive modes on offer, Sport being the optimum if you’re after the most rounded everyday drive by way of sharpened throttle, brakes, suspension and steering. Range is obviously leaner with the energy, Track turns everything up to 11, Custom allows you to mix and match, while Drift basically sends all the torque to the rear axle if you want to bonfire your Michelin Pilot Sports.
That’s for later. Drive it in one of its less aggressive modes and the Nevera does a very reasonable impression of, say, a Bentley Continental GT. It’s suspended on double wishbones all round with electronically controlled dampers and active ride height, so it’s tolerably comfortable at everyday speeds, if occasionally crashy over sudden surface imperfections.
Having crossed the Velebitski Kanal and picked up the road near Prizna, the Nevera reveals itself to be dense with layers of personality. The secret sauce here, of course, is the torque vectoring, a fiendishly complex set-up that effectively turns the Rimac into five cars in one. There are 77 separate ECUs and millions of lines of code hustling around its body – mainframe? – but rather than schizophrenia, the result is a remarkable bandwidth. The Rimac All-Wheel Torque Vectoring (R-AWTV 2) effectively supplants regular ESP and traction control systems, working predictively and responsively to make 100 calculations per second. Depending on mode, you can revel in all-wheel grip, neutralising understeer and finding a friendly balance, or send all the torque to the rear axle and do daft skids (later, I said).
In Sport mode, the Nevera summons up the wieldiness you’d find in, say, the Porsche 911 Turbo, but punches out of a corner with the ferocity of something that has three times the Porsche’s horsepower (which it has). This hurricane force isn’t a surprise but its agility and poise are really something. As is the way it sloughs off its mass: it feels half a tonne lighter than it is, like a car with optimal weight distribution and centre of gravity rather than one with a Caterham Seven’s worth of battery at its heart.
Miro and his team are still finessing the braking. An electrohydraulic brake booster with a pedal feel simulator distributes braking force between the friction brakes – beefy 390mm Brembo carbon ceramics front and rear – and the electric powertrain, according to which is thermally optimal. The Nevera offers the highest amount of regen braking of any EV currently on sale, and while there’s room for improvement in how the old and new blend, you can hustle effectively along a twisty road in one-pedal mode. The faster you go, the bigger the leap of faith.
Then there’s the Nevera’s chassis, made entirely of carbon fibre – bonded roof, integrated battery housing and rear subframe – which gives it the torsional rigidity of a Le Mans Prototype. Rimac claims it’s the most rigid road car ever made, and at 70.000 Nm/degree it’s approximately twice as stiff as the far-from-floppy Lamborghini Aventador. There’s the odd creak and groan – carbon fibre can generate unusual acoustic anomalies – but mostly
“THE NEVERA’S AGILITY AND POISE ARE REALLY SOMETHING”
“IT SOUNDS REALLY GOOD. A MIX OF WHOOSH, WHIRR AND SCI-FI”
you’re just aware of how phenomenally well engineered the Nevera is. Yes, the urge remains to reach for shift paddles, and the seamless nature of the powertrain invariably removes a layer of interaction. It simply doesn’t sizzle like a V12. But as you can imagine, the availability of almost 1,900 expertly calibrated horsepower kinda compensates. And actually it sounds really good, an authentic mix of whoosh, whir and sci-fi. Not so far from a Chiron, then. And faster.
Our drive culminates at Zadar airport, a runway being the only possible location to experience the violent thrust the Nevera is capable of. Performing a launch start is dead easy: select Track mode on the dash mounted rotary controller nearest your right hand, press the brake for a few seconds, then release and stand on the accelerator. The next 10 or 15 seconds are simply vapourised. Time ceases to exist, or at least exist in the form in which we recognise it. Whatever happens, I do it twice just to be sure. Then a third time to double check that what happened the first two times was for real. By this point my internal organs have swapped places, a situation that a spell exploring the Drift mode does little to help.
Mate Rimac is a self-confessed data fiend so the central screen is also home to the Nevera’s telemetry, which can be downloaded to a laptop or smartphone for review. He meets us at the runway and once he’s happy that we’re happy, he gleefully tells me where I was accelerating most vigorously, what mode I was in, and how much power I used: 1,580bhp apparently. Not so much Big Brother as your genius Croatian cousin.
Rimac has developed its own M2M data system to allow owners to analyse driving performance, metrics and map previews on all the usual platforms, and there will be over-the-air updates as and when. On top of all this, there’s also an AI driver coach, which uses the car’s 12 ultrasonic sensors, 13 cameras and six radars hooked up to the latest NVIDIA Pegasus operating system to overlay race circuits in real-time to allow drivers to work on the perfect line, and braking and acceleration points.
There’s a lot to unpack. As the first true pure electric hypercar to land, there’s a pioneering feel to the Rimac Nevera. This thing’s quarter mile time blitzes the Bugatti Chiron Sport’s and its pace everywhere is intergalactic. But the most powerful ICE cars also generate huge character, and it’s their engines and the noise they make that tend to linger longest in the memory. Even the highest of high performance can become one-dimensional.
But the Nevera feels like it’s been engineered and developed by people who aren’t just way ahead of the technological and software curve, they have an innate feeling for the hardware too. Put the elements together and you have a car that isn’t just entertaining, it feels like a significant step on the road ahead. Think of Rimac as a sort of techno Pagani, with as much focus on artistry as artificial intelligence. Those software guys are human after all.
“THINK OF RIMAC AS A SORT OF TECHNO PAGANI”