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quietus [soylentnews.org] writes:

On August 8, Elon Musk is going to present his fully-autonomous, all-electric car. But on the other side of the Atlantic, somebody has pipped him to it.

That somebody is a real tech wunderkind, a 36-year old Bosnian/Croatian by the name of Mate Rimac.

During his high-school years, Mr. Rimac won local, national and international competitions for electronics and innovation. Then he got interested into racing, and, at the age of 18, bought the cheapest racing car he could find, a 1984 BMW E30 323i. After that car's gasoline engine exploded during a race, he decided to turn the car into an electric one.

That was 2006. He was laughed at and ridiculed for the idea alone, but by 2009 his car started winning races, while beating a couple of world FIA and Guinness records. That success encouraged him to try and start a company which built electrical cars, insisting that the company should be based in Croatia, which did not have a car industry to talk about. Fast forward some more episodes of ridicule, tethering on the edge of bankruptcy and so on, and that fledgling company has turned into the main provider for battery software and electrical powertrain systems to about half the car industry, world-wide: Porsche, Hyundai, Kia, Renault, Jaguar, Aston Martin, SEAT, Koenigsegg and Automobili Pininfarina are some of its customers.

Rimac didn't stop building cars though: supercar enthusiasts know him, and his partner in crime, designer Adriano Mudri, as the men behind the Rimac Nevera [rimac-automobili.com] (which can be yours for a cool (estimated) $2.2 million), and the guys who, three years ago, took over Bugatti [bugatti.com] from Volkswagen, with the participation of Porsche.

And now Rimac Automobili has come out with the Rimac Verne [topgear.com] (yes, yes, that Verne [wikipedia.org]), a fully autonomous robotaxi. Rollout towards world domination starts in 2026 in Zagreb, Croatia, where you'll be able to order its taxis through an app, complete with the interior lighting and scent you want. What you will need, though, is a bit of trust: there will be no steering wheel or brakes present, which might turn into an advantage in case you want to get rid of your elderly mother-in-law for a while.

Rimac and Mudri have been working at this project for a bit of time already: in an 2021 interview with the Belgian financial newspaper De Tijd, Mate Rimac stated:

"Fundamentally, self-driving cars are logic itself: the cars which are being built now, only are used effectively about 3 to 4 percent of the time. With robotaxis that's 60 to 70 percent: that alone is a huge economic change. And it's better for traffic safety too. This thing is like flying to the moon: everybody knows it's a giant challenge, but who gets there first will also reap giant rewards."

Rimac now has fired the starting engine for that rocket-to-the-moon, but it remains to be seen whether his company can beat the self-driving algorithms of Tesla, trained by all the data that Musk's customers have been sending to the mothership for years.

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