BMW does not make a car that competes with the Rimac Nevera. BMW doesn’t make a car that can even hope to keep up with the Nevera, even if the Bimmer had a 200-meter head start. However, BMW—as well as every other automaker—needs to take a long hard look at what Rimac is doing because the new Nevera completely changes the electric supercar game and resets the expectations of what EVs can do.
Today, the Rimac Nevera released the footage of its top speed run at Automotive Testing Papenburg (ATP) and all of its performance specs. It was a good day for Rimac because the Nevera broke 23 (twenty three!) world records.
What is Nevera? The Rimac Nevera is a quad-motor, all-electric hypercar that makes an astonishing 1,877 horsepower and 1,741 lb-ft of torque. Its 117 kWh battery pack gives it 205 miles of range and it has 500 kW charging capabilities. While its range is short, considering its massive battery, it makes more horsepower than a Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport, which I think is a fair compromise.
So how did the Nevera do at ATP? Here are some of the headline figures: 0-60 mph in 1.74 seconds, 0-124 mph in 4.42 seconds, 0-124-0 mph in 8.85 seconds, quarter-mile in 8.26 seconds, half-mile in 12.82 seconds, and 0-200 mph in 10.86 seconds. If none of those figures dropped your jaw, there may not be hope left for your soul. Some of those figures are so absurd, I had to reread them several times. A half-mile in 12.82 seconds? That’s only about a second slower than it takes the M3 Competition to do a quarter-mile. So the Rimac can cover almost double the distance in the same period of time. Nutty.
In Chris Harris’s review from Top Gear, he takes the Nevera to a runway to test its straight line speed and it hits 219 mph easier than any other vehicle in history. It’s so fast that it made the Lamborghini Aventador SVJ, one of the fastest cars on the planet, look like a Volkswagen Golf. It was embarrassing. There are no two ways about it—the Nevera is the fastest accelerating vehicle in the history of the automobile and there isn’t a close second.
But it isn’t just its straight line speed that makes the Nevera so shocking. It’s also fun to drive, has a well balanced chassis, drifts like some of the best rear-drivers on the market, and is capable of making even Harris—one of the most ardent defenders of internal combustion—smile. The Nevera proves that electric supercars aren’t just fast but they can be silly good fun and it’s the first one to really do that. Yes, its $2.2 million price tag is absurd but no one questions the Bugatti Chiron for costing the same. The Nevera is an absolute game changer and a car that every EV brand, BMW included, needs to copy.
