Rimac is a car company with an interesting history. They make electric supercars and became famous after Richard Hammond crashed one off the side of a cliff in Switzerland. That was called the Concept One, and it ended up in a ball of crumpled, burnt metal.
Today, we’re looking at the new Rimac Nevera, which unlike the Concept One is a full production car. It costs $2.4 million and makes 2000 horsepower thanks to four powerful electric motors, so twice as much as a Formula 1 car. She’ll reportedly do 0 to 60 mph in only 1.4 seconds, which makes it faster than… everything.
Because the Rimac doesn’t have the notoriety or beautiful lines of a Bugatti, you might think that it’s a wannabe, a fake, or a deathtrap. However, this next video from Carwow proves that’s far from the case. Mat Watson was at the Continental test facility where they crash cars. The company make the airbag system and needed to ensure the car complies with both European and American regulations.
It’s interesting that 10 prototypes have to go through 45 crashes, even though production probably won’t be that high. Maybe that’s why the Rimac Nevera is so expensive. Rimac has announced that it will make 50 Neveras a year for 3 years (about 1 per week), resulting in a total of 150 cars. The car uses the same platform as the Pininfarina Battista, which will share its assembly line.
The crash that Mat Watson is part of is the side impact test with a pole, a requirement of the U.S. market. And unlike Hammond, he doesn’t want to be in the car when the crashing happens. Instead, the Continental engineers are allowing him to flip the switch, as it were, and send the prototype hurling sideways at about 30 miles per hour. This is apparently the final test before the Nevera can be legally sold.
Why does it look like that?
Well, this prototype has already gone through several front-impact tests. The bodywork that was damaged is replaced by counterweights bolted to its front frame. And the wiring is there because Rimac wants to measure everything and see if 3D crash simulations match what’s happening in the real world. Engineers are apparently getting a 98% correlation between those two, and they’re pretty happy with that.
I’ve watched tens or even hundreds of crash tests over the years, and I still learned something new from the Carwow footage. Apparently, there’s a special nail on the crash barrier/pole that needs to hit a certain line in the car to show that the crash was accurate. It’s also interesting to note that lines of paint are painted on the dummies in specific places to better visualize where they hit the airbags.
The Nevera is named after a really nasty Croatian storm, this being a car made in Croatia. If you’d like to know a little more and maybe see the carbon fiber chassis that got subjected to this crash, check out Mat Watson’s review. It’s entertaining, and he even got a carbon fiber stick from Rimac to measure the fakeness of its vents.
