Rimac Nevera Hits 412kph to Become World’s Fastest Production Electric Car
rimac-automobili.com
rimac-automobili.com
Source: My Dalmatian father
Fun fact: Jugo (another frequent wind on Adriatic coast) is even stronger wind, but what makes bora/bura special are strong sudden gusts.
I saw it jack-knife a semi truck on my way back from Dalamatia to Istria, all my Life I ave seen the aftermath of the Santa Ana winds in SoCal but I've never seen it happen in person, but I was stalking that truck for at least 15 mins keeping my distance as the the carriage swayed hard left an right as the Bura got stronger as we got higher in elevation.
Eventually the hitch thing that attaches to the front part of the truck snapped and sent it flying into the air and then sliding down the road, it blocked the entire 3 lane road. I checked to make sure the guy was fine and then left when the police showed up.
Ironically, I had a Bura beer [0] with my food at a cafe as I was waiting for the rain to stop. I got hme to Istria pretty late, and all my patio furniture was tossed up, The Bura is no joke, but it has a cleansing effect; everything felt lighter after that storm.
I can guess that was under Velebit, where bura is often very strong and at those times the road is closed for motorcycles, campers, double-deckers and vehicles with trailers.
But people regularly ignore those restrictions because they are not aware of the danger.
Possibly, I couldn't tell you where exactly it was to be honest.
I'm not stranger to driving in 100MPH winds (Santa Ana), and I even did my Motorcycle endorsement in 70mph winds (I dropped their bike coming to a stop due to a freak side gust) but my little under-powered Golf was being tossed around by the Bura so bad that I was just waiting for the thing to jack knife as there were no exits for like +30km.
I took the toll road the rest of the way back to Istria as it wasn't worth it in the end.
There already exists Volkswagen Bora, which was a sedan version of Golf 4. (Basically, a renamed Jetta; just like Vento in the generation before)
oh well
That would be neverin.
Nevera is a storm/thunderstorm in the Adriatic in general, not necessarily a short lasting one.
Yep, it's of Romance origin, etymological dictionaries list it as originating in Venetian nevèra, with an understandable semantic shift.
I was commenting on the "short lasting" part (and the nuances between neverin vs nevera, first one being for "short lasting" storms/thunderstorms, the latter being more generic).
>The root of the word seems to be disbelief ne + vjera
The word is completely unrelated to disbelief, it's of Venetian origin (< nevèra, meaning snow blizzard).
And confirmed by Miro Zrncevic when he and Nevera appeared on Jay Leno's Garage.
He spent about a minute explaining the term in detail and you nailed it.
I'm always frustrated (and I'm not even a native Croatian speaker) that automotive journalists often pronounce the company name "Reemack".
(*) dialects on wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialects_of_Serbo-Croatian#Div...
One of the provided examples has variations of the word "vjera" meaning faith in each dialect, ne-vjera is basically non-faith.
> faith věra vera vira vjera
On the other hand, the Audio "e-tron" changed its name in France because "étron" means excrement in French.
Toyota Premio (prize)
Suzuki Alto (tall)
Mazda Laputa (well, yeah, it's an island, but if you read it quickly it sounds like "the wh\*re")
Lamborghini Reventón (It's the name for a bull, but it means puncture or tire blowout)
kuga means "plague" in bosnian/croatian/serbian/slovenian
That's an urban legend. It sold fine.
Stretching a bit to fit a narrative?
There was never Honda Fita. In USA, that's Honda Fit, and in Europe the same car is called Honda Jazz.
"Kauai" wouldn't be much better, as the first part of this word translates to turd.
"No va" is just "it's not going", which is about as awkward a way to describe a non-working vehicle in Spanish as it is in English. If my Nova broke down, yes, I'd make the pun.
Now, if they'd tried to sell the Chevy Es Chingado...
“Mitsubishi marea” translated literally from Spanish as a full sentence and not as “make and model of a car “ is “Mitsubishi makes you dizzy”.
In Spanish.
In general, I underestimated the progress that electric vehicles would make over the last ~2 years. Most manufacturers have at least one decent EV on the market now. Where I live (Toronto, Canada), EV charging infrastructure still needs a lot of improvement but it's an inevitability now.
(The car’s engine power is 1914bhp, which is about 1400kW, the car’s battery is 120kWh.)
But my point kinda remains, the relatively poor range isn’t mentioned. The range of the Nevera is 40% of a similarly performing car that is approaching 20 years old now.
And the Veyron can be refuelled in minutes!
Is that supposed to be unimpressive? The fact that EVs is catching up to or beating (see Pikes Peak) ICE in almost every category except range, in the few years since EV development was rebooted with the Nissan Leaf and Tesla Roadster, is kind of insane.
And yeah, range for EVs is now consistently around half that of pure ICE vehicles. Which is impressive enough considering how it was just a few years ago, but it also means that, since a 2x battery improvement which is quite likely (at least 1.5x improvements are being achieved in cells that are already past the laboratory stage and in early trial production), it's almost inevitable that EV will beat pure ICE on range. Well, you could always sacrifice trunk space for extra gas tank or use serial hybrid or something to get really good range with ICE. But point is EVs are clearly getting to around parity level or "good enough"
> And can be refuelled in minutes!
That'll always be a benefit. Probably the only one.
But it really doesn't matter for 99% of usecases. Around 20-30 minutes is OK since you can just leave the car and do whatever you want. Most of the fast chargers around me are next to super markets, shopping malls, hardware stores, etc. Most people will charge overnight, and yes, that goes for public street side parking too. Oslo already has public street side charging poles all over the place. You've got solutions to retrofit street lamps, and now you've got this as well which should be cheaper/easier than poles: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/arms-manufacturer-giant-r...
The company was using an oval track with 2 different 4km straitawas to briefly hit that speed.
I guess maybe you get priority treatment when you're dropping north of $40K on tires every 15 minutes... :-)
Point taken of course!
Blew up the turbo though, and had to limp it another 2 hours to get to my destination. I also got to learn how to replace the turbo and weld the manifold, since I'd cracked it.
Still, amazing memory. Scary as heck, and to this day I'm surprised I didn't die.
Survivorship bias. In all other timelines you died, you can't be surprised ;-)
Same applies for me as well. I've been lucky more than once.
That the Nevera can do 5 minutes with 'only' 120kWh is actually amazing. Petrol has an energy density of 12200Wh/kg. At 0.79kg/l, the Veron had a total capacity of 963kWh. That's 8 Times more energy, yet still less than 2 times the range.
MPG went rapidly south in the second half of the rev counter.
They added the speed limit back (again IIRC) because someone got several tickets and sued saying (along the lines of) "there's no way I can tell if I'm going too fast without the speed limit".
On paper, yeah. But they are manufactured in pathetically small quantities.
This was plainly apparent to me 3-4 years ago and I'm a "jalopnik" level of automotive reader (as in idiot with keyboard level expertise)
So the hypercar people get to charge with a straight face a multi-million dollar car that's faster than their previous versions, but make wayyyyy more money. The Plaid Model S is a !!!150k!!! hypercar beater, and it's a sedan. If Elon wasn't a moron of marketing, that car would have been selling with many many many variants (see: BMW) each adding 50-100k to the price until you got up to the 500-700k range.
[0] https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/2021/07/Bugatti-Rimac.h...
> Rimac will hold a 55 per cent share in the Bugatti Rimac joint venture, while Porsche will have a 45 per cent share. Porsche also holds a 24 per cent share in Rimac directly.
Which means Porsche owns more than 50% of the Rimac-Bugatti joint venture, they did it on purpose.
Porsche also recently spun off of VW (Porsche famously failed it's short squeeze on VW: they'd have acquired VW had the 2008 financial crisis not hit) and back then VW had to come to Porsche's rescue.
I worked for VAG during Diesel-gate, and it's only now after several years that I bothered to look into it's sordid History: it's like GoT, the innter family rivalry is the stuff that episodes of shows like GoT are made of. Between VW/Audi/POrsche are like decades long fights between cousins and wife-stealing etc...
It's really all rather insane that on top of that VW was primarily a vapourware piece of propaganda created by Hitler for the emergence of the Nazi party: most people who bought them during the war never actually received one until years later after the war when the British took it over.
Rimac is also mainly a proto-type company with a strong emphasis on being an OEM supplier of in house EV parts for those other divisions and has been focusing more and more on the supply chain side things since COVID; so congrats to the team in Zagreb for this momentous achievement!
That's some slightly dodgy math. 412kph is 256mph according to my conversion, and Google, and Wolfram.
More interestingly, that's approximately Mach 0.3.
The model S plaid was initially governor-locked to 162 mph / 260 mph but has since been recorded reaching up to 216 mph / 348 km/h. The Nevera’s 412 kph is 256 mph.
Reaching 256 mph requires 40% more power to overcome just wind resistance than to reach 216 mph. If you doubled the power of the Tesla Model S Plaid you'd potentially reach somewhat shy of 305 mph (ignoring all drag other than wind). If you doubled the power of the Never you'd potentially reach somewhat less than 362 mph (ignoring all drag other than wind).
I believe Tesla's 0-60 time is probably mainly tire friction limited rather than power-limited. It achieves average forward G's of 1.37G's, which is really pushing what people think matches the maximum frictional coefficients of street-legal tires using modern technology. Non street-legal F1 tires reach about 5G’s on braking. This is equivalent to a force of 6200 lbs-force acting on the Tesla with mass of 4766 lbs-mass. If there were a theoretical abundance of power available to sustain keeping the tires at their frictional limit, the Tesla Model S Plaid would max out at 628 mph in the absence of additional frictions beyond additional wind resistance.
At this speed, 628 mph, the tires would lose traction if any more power was applied to the wheels. To reach this speed would require over 8 times as much horsepower as the Tesla Model S currently uses to reach 216 mph.
So anyways, that's the ceiling for these vehicles. Somewhere around 8,000 horsepower. However, worth noting that the fastest land speed records for wheel-driven vehicles is only 400mph. And the fastest electric wheel-driven vehicle (Buckeye Bullet) achieved >300mph (almost 500kph) using an engine with only 400HP. It is very, very thin though with minimal frontal area, and definitely not street-legal.
Assuming that 400mph is a hard limit for tires and other mechanical systems, that would require the Tesla to produce about 3400 horsepower.
412 kph is 256 mph, not 258 mph. To go any faster in the U.S. they're going to need another byte.
https://www.montpellier-appliances.com/product-details/montp...
You'd be amazed how much more water you can get out of things like towels with one of those. Chuck something light like a fleece or acrylic jumper in and it comes out dry enough to wear.
The load would need to be balanced unless it had impractically massive shielding or some kind of auto-balancing system. Without those, the centrifuge would create a big hazard to itself and anyone nearby.
That said, I want one!
If you can get the insides really clean, you can juice about 60 oranges at once.
We need affordable reasonable vehicles rather than bigger, faster, more luxurious.
Race cars are the development & staging environment for car manufacturers.
I mean, take your reasoning one step farther- it would be better to have fewer cars, so who cares about anything that isn't a bus or a self-driving taxi? The only cars that should exist are the ones that can't be replaced with more efficient alternatives.
For instance, cars purely for recreation, like racecars. Those cars should be made into EVs. Like this.
if humanity were only about efficiency we would be eating soylent green.
Yup, this is one of the reasons I got a Model 3 Performance rather than a Nissan GT-R.
Incredibly powerful ICEs end up being horribly inefficient. Having 500+ horsepower means getting 20 mpg while cruising.
There's probably a limit, where having larger motors starts to lower efficiency, but at the ~450 hp level of a M3P, it isn't being hit.
It'd be interesting to see the range on this 412 kph Nevera when it cruises at 120 kph (~75 mph).
Electric cars have long had a reputation of being slow, golf cart like, and generally a silly idea. Tesla snapped that perception a bit, but built the idea that electric cars are for tech bros and bougie folks.
Cars like this help break other reputational barriers to the adoption of EVs. Someone sees this and it puts to rest the idea that EVs are slow or ugly necessarily.
It's also a marketing stunt to sell their technology to other automakers.
I think they perfectly understand the point of electrification.
Cars are weird. They are a ubiquitous mode of transport, and also a stylized representation of personality.
A successful, normal car manufacturer makes a handful of ridiculously expensive, fast, uncomfortable, cool-looking sports cars. These don't make a profit: they serve as advertising and marketing.
They tell the consumer that some of the same technologies are used in the aspirational sports cars that they sell to enthusiasts. And those share a marketing name with the sporty coupes and hatchbacks that they sell to people who tell themselves that they like to drive.
Tesla's Roadsters were expensive, impractical, and eye-catching. They served as a proof-of-marketing-concept for the Model S... which was expensive, eye-catching, but more practical. And more variations became less expensive, less eye-catching, and generally more practical.
Assuming Tesla still exists in ten years, you should expect to see a cheaper smaller version of the 3, and a long-range minivan.