Porsche boosts its stake in Rimac to 15.5 percent

Last June, it was announced that Porsche AG bought a 10-percent stake in Rimac Automobili. This May, Hyundai invested another $90 million in the EV company, partly in exchange for the development of two high-performance cars—likely a Hyundai N flagship and some sort of a fuel-cell vehicle under the Genesis luxury brand. Now, Porsche is back for another 5.5 percent of the pie.

This news comes just two days after the debut of Porsche’s first all-electric vehicle, the long-awaited 2020 Taycan. Rimac is also known to be working on Spanish Seat’s electric Cupra race car, and there’s no doubt it runs multiple secret projects with other brands within the Volkswagen Group. With all the Audi e-trons, Volkswagen I.D.s and future electrified Lamborghinis coming up, there’s certainly a lot of demand for EV expertise.

“Porsche has accompanied Rimac in its positive development for a year,” says Lutz Meschke, deputy chairman of the executive board and chief financial officer of Porsche AG. “It quickly became clear to us that Porsche and Rimac could learn a lot from each other. We are convinced of Mate Rimac and his company, so now we have increased our stake and are expanding our cooperation in battery technology.”

All while Rimac’s now 600-strong team is working hard to boost the company’s fame further as a high-performance Tier-1 supplier, its roughly 1914-horsepower electric hypercar, the C_Two is also going through a rigorous crash testing process. 

Back at the 2019 Geneva Motor Show, Mate Rimac told Road & Track that in order to run the same processes as big OEMs its small operation needed to build 30 C_Two prototypes  and run tests simultaneously for Europe and the U.S. Once the first car got crashed in the name of science, the C_Two’s design is locked. Now, Rimac seems to be past that point, with first deliveries of the C_Two planned for late 2020.