The Rimac Nevera Just Shattered Pretty Much Every Acceleration Record | Hacker News Reader

The Rimac Nevera Just Shattered Pretty Much Every Acceleration Record

thedrive.com

80 pointsclouddrover83 comments

Rimac has been making some insanely performing electric cars. Richard Hammond crashed a prototype on The Grand Tour.

https://www.topgearbox.com/cars/entertainment/the-grand-tour...

dangerously fast, this shouldn't be legal. if you were to build a drag racing car to those speeds you'd need a cage certified to 7.50s, something like this https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0362/8420/3141/products/25...

Do you have intimate knowledge of how strong the carbon fiber structure of the car is?

Like, I agree we shouldn't have cars that can go over even 100mph on public roads, as that risks other people's lives, but all of them can already. If someone wants to risk their own life with an insufficiently caged car at a race track, that is their business, no need to make it illegal.

Plus drag racing has recently changed the thresholds where cages are needed to be more in line with modern cars, which are stronger and can go 8 seconds without any drama, and have good brakes to stop from there.

> Like, I agree we shouldn't have cars that can go over even 100mph on public roads, as that risks other people's lives, but all of them can already.

Do you mean in the U.S.? Everywhere? My understanding is that cars in Germany often exceed 100 MPH.

It's not safer in Germany than anywhere else in the world.

Having been on roads in Germany and other places in the world, I find this to be a ridiculous statement.

German roads are built very well indeed. If you're a US citizen, come to Germany and you'll find like you've travelled 20 years into the future. The tarmac is much better, signs reflect much better, it all feels much better maintained.

Then again, Germany is a tiny country compared to the US. Of course you can build expensive roads if you don't have to build long roads.

By the way, if you drive from Germany to Austria, you'll get that feeling again: they spend even more money per km of highway; it's again a significant step up.

Somehow it is, and statistics prove it [0]. There a lot more to safety than just physics.

Safety takes into account many other factors, this is why speed limits vary. Driving in Germany is safer than in places with worse infrastructure, general state of the vehicles, or driver education (as in "obeying the rules"). Simply put, better roads, better cars, and more conscious drivers will lead to higher safety even at higher speeds.

Romania and Bulgaria have a whopping ~3 times higher road death rates than Germany despite having low speed limits. This obscures the fact that both countries have a relatively poor general state of the infrastructure, of the vehicles, and of driver behavior.

I'm sure lowering the speed limits would make traffic even safer and also lower pollution, energy consumption, noise, road wear. But thinking safety is an absolute thing is making the same mistake people buying SUVs make.

[0] https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/preliminary-...

Germany at least used have an extremely rigorous licensing process so the average German driver was considerably more skilled than the average American. Maybe someone can let us know if that’s still the case.

Still the case, but similar to many other European states. Austria, France, UK and Sweden have the same requirements (lived there or have very close friends on these).

US roads are much easier to drive though. Even in LA driving is much more relaxed. That city is just built for cars. I think it's reasonable that the US driving test isn't as strict.

EDIT: Sweden also has a mandatory snow & ice training as part of the learning. You can do that in Germany, too, but it's not part of your driving exam. Makes, of course, perfect sense given the weather in each of these countries.

Your typical SUV is more dangerous.

To others or yourself? In the early 1990s SUVs had more risk than cars for a while due to rollover risk, but today SUVs are safer for it's own occupants than cars on average.

As for other people on the road, yes the added mass is dangerous. But the Rimac is SUV heavy too.

I'm mostly concerned with others. If you want to kill yourself - that's your life. But threatening other people should be strictly regulated.

And SUVs are more dangerous for many reasons, not only mass. For example "regular" cars hit you in your legs and you roll over the car which dissipates some of the energy and spreads the rest over time better. Accelerations experienced can be several times lower if you spread the collision over time. Also you're less likely to go under the car than if a SUV hit you.

> today SUVs are safer for it's own occupants than cars on average

in a crash - possibly (I've seen studies both ways, but they did started to turn more in favor recently). But you're more likely to have a crash in SUV in the first place, because of worse visibility, breaking and turning performance, as well as mental factors (I'm higher and safer, I can take more risks).

What makes you think that? This thing generates enough kinetic energy in the hands of an idiot to far exceed most SUVs, and it weighs 4700lbs anyway, there are SUVs that are lighter.

For sure.

These things are luxury/billionaire bragging devices first and foremost.

They get demoed, but they're not safe nor legal to use much of the performance on the street. And once you take it to the track you'll be hit with a massive bill to make it safe and then a bunch of restrictions because at the track they tend to do the math and actually be more rational about what is safe and what is not safe.

F1 would not allow this car to race on its closed courses, and F1 is about the most demanding there is in terms of track safety. There are basically no tracks that are actually designed to be safe for the speeds this car can hit. Especially in the US where most tracks have a far lower safety factor designed in.

> They get demoed, but they're not safe nor legal to use much of the performance on the street.

On the German autobahn there are parts without any speed limits so you can use all of the power there.

Also Nürburgring during public sessions is legally considered a public street (if you crash you will have to get police to make a report etc) so you can drive any road legal car there which the Nevera is.

> And once you take it to the track you'll be hit with a massive bill to make it safe and then a bunch of restrictions because at the track they tend to do the math and actually be more rational about what is safe and what is not safe.

Nah you can go to any track you want and the owner won't care (outside of you paying the damages if you crash).

The problems will arrive once you try to enter some racing series but Rimac could just create their own Nevara racing series just like a some supercars have.

But still the Nevera is not a race car. If it was it would have been built to fit into some racing series spec but it clearly isn't.

What "bill to make it safe" are you referring to? Do track tech inspections usually have a speed limit requirement?

So what you're telling me is, I should expect to see some idiot 25 year old princeling tooling around in Dubai with one any day now.

What a world we live in.

You don't need a cage if you don't go racing. Also the single piece carbon body may be strong enough to not need a cage.

Though convincing FIA of that fact is going to be really hard so probably easier to just weld one in there if you want to race it for some reason (and find a racing series that would accept it)

edit: And a cage without a proper racing harness and a helmet (+ HANS device) can be really dangerous.

oh yes, you must be one of those "let's regulate anything fun" people.

you must think like a child

All EVs are faster than an average car needs to be. It's silly that these days even a pick-up truck can drag race Lambos.

good? the obsessive fawning over speed (especially acceleration) as some intrinsically valuable property of a car could stand some introspection by society as a whole.

loud flashy, cramped exotics being humiliated by quiet practical commuter cars 1/10th their price calls the whole hyperbolic attentiin-seeking costume show of the former into question.

Does it? Twenty years ago you could buy a souped up Honda Civic with a twin-turbo and NOS that could beat an exotic off the line, and the world of supercars didn't implode then, why would it now?

Because you couldn't buy that Civic from a dealership, and generally speaking you wouldn't have said Civic be nearly as reliable (or anywhere close to reliable) to an exotic, even as unreliable as exotics tend to be.

EVs broadly embarrass sports cars all while being more comfortable, more practical, and... usually cheaper.

It really doesn’t at all. People who want to show off still buy rolls Royce’s and Bentleys and so forth.

Most often the most annoying vehicles are Harley’s (slow), scooters (slow), and various sub $50k cars with modified exhausts.

The people with money aren’t really interested in flashing it among the poors. They’re interested in flashing it to their other rich friends…

The motivation behind the inexpensive flashy noise makers is exactly the same as the expensive ones, except there's slightly more embarrassing pretense involved, you have to make sure you don't get shown up by someone with an actual exotic when you're cruising around in your me too discount version. So-called supercars, unlike rolls or Bentleys or similar, derive their association with quality from the ability to hit certain theoretical numbers on a drag strip or a race track. When a basic $40,000 family car can do the same it rather knocks the entire mystique out from underneath these things. There's no more basis for pretending that it's about performance or speed.

In all cases they are all pretending that they are interested in the speed as if it is a proxy for their ability to appreciate the fine technology and precision engineering of their automobiles. When in reality a Toyota Prius is equally if not more an accomplishment of refined technology than any exotic.

The whole thing is just an excuse to project an image of wealth and status to impress strangers and play a one-upsmanship game with the rest of your interest group, very much like watches except with the ability to annoy the neighbors as a petty power tripping bonus on the side.

Fun factoid about the Rimac Nevera: it's a crappy name in Spanish (European flavour). Nevera means fridge and it's used in everyday language. It sounds really uninteresting.

Now that we're a bit off topic... let's talk about Mitsubishi Pajero. Also used in everyday language in Spanish and it means 'wanker' (UK) or 'jerkoff' (USA). They had to change the name in some markets because it sounded really funny and/or awful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Pajero

Picture an ice box hurtling down the freeway at 100mph.

"Nevera" means "storm"; specifically a storm on the sea.

In Spanish it most definitely does not. The most accurate translation would be ice box, or freezer, if you want to be super pedantic.

But then it's not a Spanish car. ;)

For more stories about products badly named for international markets, heck out "International Business Blunders". It's the only business book that's made me laugh out loud.

Kona bicycles had to be rebranded in Portugal due to the translation being offensive/derogatory.

Isuzu sold a small truck called the Hombre. I saw one this week here in the US, and thought it was some joke sticker or something. Nope, turns out Isuzu took an S-10 and called it "guy" or "man". The Isuzu man truck.

It's very frustrating to see the 1/2 mile record time in seconds and then go looking for comparisons which are all in mph or kph instead of seconds.

Yes, there's pace calculators, but that would require effort on my part.

Different things, surely? Seconds to half mile is a measure of (average) acceleration; we’re starting from a standstill. To get the speed after x seconds you need to know the acceleration curve and integrate; knowing the average acceleration is not enough. Kph or mph are measures of (instantaneous or sustained or average) speed and do not tell anything about acceleration.

Ask GPT-4 to write you a bookmarklet/userscript to convert those automatically.

(I mean it. I'm still in awe of this even being possible. But it's great for one-off band-aids like this.)

It's not possible unless you make assumptions about the acceleration rate: does it accelerate a lot at the start, or is it sustained? It depends on mass, power (and how power output varies with speed), and drag (and how this varies with speed). Definitely not a simple unit conversion.

It uses 1.2 megawatt when accelerating. Amazing.

A Croatian company founded by a guy who's..35...

What does the age or nationality of the founder have to do with it? Do cars go less fast in Croatia?

The obvious, I think: Croatia is small and doesn't have much of a car industry, nor of a history of tech development.

>doesn't have much of a car industry

Rimac is focused on electric car part development like electro-hydraulic brake system. You don't have to have assembly lines for that.

>no history of tech development

Croatia has Rimac and Infobip, which puts them above average unicorn per capita in EU. Companies are succeeding in spite of leftover corruption from commie times.

> nor of a history of tech development

Oh, it has a very long history of tech development, including that one guy whose name was stolen for that other overvalued EV company.

I haven't seen much of that history, and Tesla might have been born in current Croatia, but was ethnically a Serb, but most importantly, he did most of his work in the US. I think that's what makes that car company more remarkable: talented tech/entrepeneur doesn't go to the States.

> most importantly, he did most of his work in the US

That is correct, and I agree that it's most important -- his ethnicity is completely irrelevant (no more than Steve Jobs's Syrian one) and his place of birth just slightly more, as it defined where he went for education (Graz and Prague) and early work (Budapest and Paris, which led directly to his move to the US).

> I haven't seen much of that history

Which is fair, especially considering the fact that it wasn't a separate country for most of its history. But things like electric speedometer, military torpedo, rubber hot water bottle and a few others came from there.

I'd argue the company would be less remarkable if it was founded by an 50 year old ex-BMW manager in Bavaria.

Mate Rimac is an impressive man, have a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_Rimac

Who’s also now the CEO of Bugatti Rimac, a new JV between Porsche, Bugatti, and Rimac.

I will just put this here: https://youtu.be/WAf1_zWThyE?t=526

Who started his company at 23 which is even more impressive. The founders of Tesla for, example, were well established in consumer electronics before starting the car company. And cars are the most complex consumer electronics on the market. So starting this endeavor in your early 20s is really impressive.

Gordon Murray built his first car in his early twenties.

Koenigsegg founded his company when he was in his early twenties.

Don't be fooled by these headlines. His father is known for close ties with the ruling party and was/is under investigation for all sorts of laundering and land schemes. I would not be surprised if some of that money ended up as a seed for the company and car development.

I thought the McMurtry Spéirling was even faster: 0-60 in about 1.4s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVbir_r6Wb4

The name is absolutely terrible though.

Yes, but it's not road legal, although they're working on a road-legal version.

Insanely awesome car though.

I wonder what its top speed is?

412kph/258mph

Or at least that is the fastest speed we have seen it go in videos.

edit: Also the top speed according to https://www.rimac-automobili.com/nevera/

I stopped being excited about super cars at around 18. Give one to Ronaldo, one to some random sheikh and forget about it.

Maybe they interest HN folks because they sit at the edge of humans technical ability?

There are likely a good many similarly-distinct pieces of technology you are excited by, or you wouldn't be here.

It's just another form of art, or perhaps engineering as a sport.

I find it nice that fast or beautiful cars have been more accessible to regular people every year since the lamborghini countach or ferrari daytona.

Specs say nearly 500km range.... but at what speed, was what I'm wondering. How long can it do, say, 250km/h for? It's cool that it gets there so fast, but if then you need to charge after 3 minutes because the battery pack had to be small to get the acceleration so high, then there wouldn't be much of a point.

Any car regardless of propulsion will have its range slashed pushing that much air, so I don't quite see the point of the question?

Battery pack is a very large one, at least by Model 3 standards. Details are in the article.

> How long can it do, say, 250km/h for?

Presumably well under an hour, with air resistance increasing quadratically.

> because the battery pack had to be small

Its 120kWh battery is quite large by industry standards, even exceeding that of the Lucid Air.

Usually some standard like WLPT (or NEDC before it came around) is used.

Though Rimac does mention on their site that proper WLPT testing has not been done yet so the "final" range will be updated later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_Harmonised_Light_Veh...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_European_Driving_Cycle

Also I highly doubt the battery can even discharge fast enough to fully run it out in 3 minutes.

There isn't anywhere you can go 250km/h for 3 minutes anyway.

I know of a couple of places but indeed, not many.

With that attitude, there's no point commenting in a thread about a car that goes 400km/h

I bet if you timed it well you could do more than that on the Nevada 375, aka the Extraterrestrial Highway.

There are many straight, nearly flat, multiple mile long strips down its nearly 100 mile long stretch that doing 155mph/250kph would be feasibly safe, including a 10+ mile stretch between Rachel and Warm Springs.

155mph/60 minutes * 3 minutes = 7.75 miles, so you could probably get pretty close to 4 minutes of 155mph with little if any danger.

Autobahn on a Sunday morning.

You can see in the video on that page that the SoC% drops from 80 to 71 during that one run to 412km/h...

If your velocity is over 400 kph and you just slam on the brakes and keep them on 100% until the car stops, does that not just totally destroy the brakes, maybe even melting them? (The kinetic energy of a 2300 kg object moving at 410 kph is over 50 gigawatt-hours)

Edit: I made a typo in wolfram alpha :]

That is why they make the brakes out of fancy carbon ceramics. You can still burn them but not in a single 400kph to 0.

They do kinda suck when driving slowly as they only really work well when hot but electric cars can just brake with the engines at those speeds to make up for it. Though they are used in combustion engine sports cars too so it is not that bad. Just need to warm them up like tires when driving hard on a race track.

For sports cars carbon ceramic brakes also have the massive advantage that they do not fade with heat like traditional brakes.

Most modern sports cars with proper brake fluid (higher boiling point) and some heat management have no problems with brake fade in steel discs. Many that track their GT3 / GT3 RS (Porsche 911) prefer steel discs due to the maintenance cost of carbon ceramic and properly designed steel discs perform just the same as carbon ceramics because the brake fade isn’t a big problem, even in a pretty extreme application like this.

Not sure if the Rimac really needs anything otherwise as well. Plus, it has regen braking and a crazy cooling system to help there. Parents math was off about the amount of energy also.

My car has carbon ceramic brakes (GT3). Two reasons: don’t need to be warmed up for full stopping power and way less brake dust. That is the only advantages in practice. On the track warming the brakes up is easy.

> over 50 gigawatt-hours

That can't be right.

2300 kg * sqr(410000/3600) * 0.5 = 14893006.000 Joules

14893006J * 0.000277778 = 4136.9 watt hours

Edit: out of curiousity, in order to have a kinetic energy of 50GWh, it would need a speed of 1424260 km/h (884994 mph)

Yeah, it's quite clearly wrong when you realize that the batteries would never be able to deliver 50GWh in the first place.

And if they could, in order to charge it up, the battery would have to consume the entire output of the world's largest power station, the Three Gorges Dam, for more than two hours. (Three Gorges Dam outputs 22.5GW

And would need about 750,000 of the best Level 3 DC fast chargers connected simultaneously.

And 0.01% inefficiency in transfer would melt the car (and the road, and...)

The video shows max power of around 1.3MW for like 10s. That's enough to get the right ballpark for the kinetic energy.

Maybe the GP assumed 410km/sec instead of 410kph.

I did based on 88 gigawatts being enough to send the vehicle backwards through time.

Great Scott!

That would mean that the batteries have that capacity too, I don’t think your math is right.

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