Looks like the range of this car, 310mi, is the same as Tesla's Model S on a full charge [0], but according to Rimac's main Wikipedia page [1] the range is 600km (~373mi).
It is more than 10x the price of the Model S though. Perhaps, with time, Rimac will become a competitor to help the electric car market become more mainstream. EDIT: I kinda doubt it, though. With a price of $980,000 that's a long way to go.
I think they're going for the supercar segment. We're talking selling a few units to rich collectors, etc.
Greyp [1] is their mass market product. Saw one this afternoon in town, they've given a handful of Greyps to a few lucky bastards who are going to test them for a few months...
Yeah, I know. But it's possible they'll go a bit more mass market in the future. But, like I said, I doubt it will happen any time soon with such a big jump.
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.
Am I the only person tired of seeing so many Wikipedia articles on Hacker News? (Currently there are two in the top 10 and there have been a bunch of others recently.)
Perhaps HN should apply a mild penalty to the wikipedia.org domain, the same as it does to many other sites such as stackexchange.com and theguardian.com.
(And yes I acknowledge the What to Submit guideline (HN:WTS) "Anything that good hackers would find interesting".)
What would be a better source for this information?
I am more likely to read a Wikipedia article than I am to read either marketing material or the same info incompletely rehashed into a more subjective blog post.
I often find myself visiting Wikipedia for the real story behind HN links.
Well, for one thing it's going into production this year (i.e. it's a real thing already). And ronaldx is right, Wikipedia material is worth more than the car's official webpage.
Am I the only person tired of seeing complaints as the first comment on every post ? Especially the ones with the form "<vaguely nice comment> BUT <trashing the whole thing>".
The original title of this submission was "Europe comes with the fastest electric car" which sparked a (frankly uninteresting) debate about OP's choice of title.
That's basically the Veyron weight, and that feels like a supercar right? The important characteristic is the weight to WHP ratio, and even the 0 to 60 is very impressive.
the veyron is a very fast car in a straight line, but it's not very good at cornering. a time of 7:40 on the nurburgring is not very good, considering you can do 7:08 in a GT-R for a tenth of the price.
A 49 kg (108 lbs) bicycle -- yeah, I don't think I want to pedal that. That thing is an electric motorcycle, with pedals if you get desperate. It might be workable if you live someplace very flat.
Note that in the EU, legally speaking that's a moped not a bicycle or an EN15194-compliant "pedelec" since it's not restricted to pedalling assistance, stays powered above 25km/h and exceeds 250W continuous. The "street mode" apparently attempts to skirt that, I'm pretty sure regulation would fall on anybody trying it out like a ton of bricks
It is more than 10x the price of the Model S though. Perhaps, with time, Rimac will become a competitor to help the electric car market become more mainstream. EDIT: I kinda doubt it, though. With a price of $980,000 that's a long way to go.
Very cool indeed.
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[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimac_Automobili