Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

I've been following development for years, and am slowly starting to think that it is vaporware as the car has been announced years ago and apparently been delivered to unnamed customers last year, yet no one seems to have ever driven let alone reviewed one.

Its a cool project and Mate Rimac is a hacker type and their whole approach is somewhat unconventional with the whole company being born out of the modified m3 he had but i think the task might just be a bit too huge for them.

The car does exist, but i am skeptical that it has a really good drivability/range/handling/security concept to make it a good product. It costs around $1M and is also super heavy. It is probably more of a halo product to channel attention on their future smaller products like the greyp bike.

It's a fast and costly toy indeed, but that's the way it is for the extreme segment of cars with combustion-based engine too. Look at Bugatti Veyron - "the fastest street-legal production car in the world" weighting almost two tons! That's OK for Rimac to be heavy. Also, the safety requirements are not so strict if the car is manufactured only in a limited number (and looking at the price-tag, it's safe to say that limited production quantity it will be).

Their problem is finding the cash to build 2 crash cars - until they have the money to do that, they can't sell, and obviously it's far harder to get investment without the safety certifications.

I've seen they've put a similar power train into the chassis of a Vauxhall VX220, so maybe that's the road they'll take with it. Although that would put them in direct competition with Tesla, so perhaps not.

Actually, Tesla's aim is to become mainstream. So far, Rimac's aim is only the high-end market segment. I think it will be beneficial to everyone, as Rimac's focus on performance should have a beneficial impact on the general perception regarding the electric cars.

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