Now we can talk,” Mate Rimac beams to TG.com. We’ve finished going over the work stuff – the next Rimac supercar, his company’s ‘MP4-12C’ moment, and a track-focused C_Two – when we pull on a thread he’s mentioned a few times throughout.
He loves cars. Proper petrolhead, which is a strange dichotomy considering his company is the hot name in electric supercars right now, working with luminaries such as Porsche, Koenigsegg and Pininfarina. But no, petrolhead through and through.

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“I don’t know why I’m a petrolhead,” he tells TG, “because my family didn’t have anything to do with cars. I was born with it I guess. My mother tells me stories that I used to pretend that my hand hurts, only so she’d put me in the car to make me stop crying. This is before I could walk or talk.
“She has all my drawings from when I was in kindergarten and school, and always I’d be drawing cars. I’ve been crazy about them all my life.” He checks us through the list: cycle licence at 12 years old, moped licence at 14, motorbike licence at 16, driving licence at 17. “As soon as I could, I did everything.” His first car? Um, a diesel Skoda Octavia. Best to move on.