Croatian start-up set to begin production of electric hypercar

Rimac Automobili unveiled its Concept_One at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September last year and took first production orders for the vehicle at last week’s Top Marques Monaco event, for scheduled delivery in early 2014.

The Concept One has a claimed total power output of 1088bhp and 3800Nm of motor torque, which compares with 1184bhp for the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport — officially the world’s fastest production car.

The range of the vehicle is 600km in normal driving mode, although the company admits this drops to between 140–180km in race mode. It can accelerate from 0–100kph in 2.8 seconds, to an electronically limited top speed of 305kph.

For the electric powertrain, the car uses four 250kW liquid-cooled permanent magnet motors controlled by Rimac’s ‘all wheel torque vectoring system’.

The powertrain is divided into the front and rear sub-systems coupled to two symmetrical motor-controller-reduction-gearbox units.

This enables control of each wheel independently in both directions thousands of times each second, as Rimac’s mechanical engineer Boris Tarnovski explained to The Engineer.