IF YOU WANT TO KNOW THE FUTURE, ASK RIMAC

OUR HIGHEST accolade at this year’s Autocar Awards, the Issigonis Trophy, goes to a man whose amazing entrepreneurial skills have taken him in just over a decade from being a clever young guy messing about with a rusty BMW to the manufacturer of million-pound electric hypercars of his own design.

Mate Rimac, founder of Rimac Automobili, will soon be the head of his country’s biggest company, whose technological know-how is now so advanced that prestige clients such as Hyundai, Porsche and Ferrari come to him for hardware, software and manufacturing projects.

Less than a year ago, his company formed a hugely significant joint venture with the Volkswagen Group to take over the running of the Bugatti marque and give it a whole new future, in both financial terms and model structure. Meanwhile, he’s working on a still-secret masstransportation project that he calls “the robotaxi” and is about to put a new self-badged hypercar into production, Rimac’s second.

If anyone understands the shape and the needs of future world transportation, it is Mate Rimac. And at 34, he is just getting started – which is great news for the industry, and of course all of us.