Electric Rimac Nevera Just Set 23 New Performance Car Records For Speed

Croatian car company Rimac has just set a whole bunch of new performance records with its Nevera.

We already knew the 2,000-horsepower Nevera was very, very quick – Rimac itself had previously claimed a 0-60 mph time of under two seconds – but now we know exactly how rapid it really is.

The records were all set on the same day, at the Automotive Testing Papenburg facility in Germany, and independently verified by timing equipment from Dewesoft and RaceLogic. The car was fitted with street-legal Michelin Cup 2 R tires and ran on what Rimac describes as “non-prepped asphalt.”

The only small caveat is how every record was completed with a one-foot rollout, meaning the stopwatches began after the Nevera had traveled 12 inches. This isn’t new, and is in fact how drag strips in the US operate.

Before we get to the good stuff, here’s Road & Track explaining back in 2017 why it, and other publications, use the one-foot rollout method: “There’s approximately one foot between where a car starts on a drag strip and where the timing actually starts. In many cars, that distance gives the car the opportunity to travel to a speed of about three mph before measuring begins and reduces the time on the strip by about three tenths of a second. It helps account for reaction times and makes every test equivalent.”

With that taken care of, let’s look at the records broken by Rimac and its electric Nevera.

Headline figures include a 0-400-0 km/h time of 29.93 seconds, beating the previous record of 31.49 seconds, set by a Koenigsegg Regera. Both of these are well ahead of the 42 seconds a Bugatti Chiron takes to do the same thing.

Then there’s the 0-60 mph time, which was just 1.74 seconds, making the Nevera even quicker than Rimac’s original claim of 1.85 seconds. A quarter-mile is dispatched in 8.25 seconds, a half-mile takes 12.82 seconds and a standing mile is completed in 20.59 seconds.

For European readers, the 0-100 km/h (62 mph) sprint took 1.81 seconds (according to Dewesoft’s equipment, which differed slightly from the 1.82 seconds recorded by Racelogic).

Priced at around $2.2m and limited to 150 examples, the Nevera hit 200 km/h (124 mph) in 4.42 seconds, 300 km/h (186 mph) in 9.22 seconds and 400 km/h (249 mph) in 21.31 seconds – a full 11 seconds quicker than a Bugatti Chiron.

It takes the Nevera just 3.21 seconds to hit 100 mph – the same time a McLaren F1 takes to reach 60 mph – and 10.86 seconds is all that’s needed to go from zero to 200 mph.

In-gear acceleration is equally mind-blowing, with the Nevera taking just 2.99 seconds to leap from 60 to 130 mph and 4.79 seconds to sprint from 200 to 300 km/h (124 to 186 mph).

The electric hypercar’s braking performance is also record-breaking, with the Nevera stopping from 62 mph in 95 feet. Standstill to 124 mph and back to zero took 8.85 seconds.

Company founder and CEO Mate Rimac said: “Growing up I always looked at the cars that made history moving the bar for performance, in awe of the kind of revolutionary technology they brought to the road. That is what is driving me from day one – to develop new technology that redefines what is possible.”

The 35-year-old, who also oversees the Bugatti brand as part of Rimac Group, added: “Today, I am proud to say that the car we’ve created can get to 400km/h and back to 0 in less time than it took the McLaren F1 to accelerate up to 350km/h. And not only that, but it can do it again and again, breaking every other performance record in the process. If you had a Nevera and access to a track, you could do it too.”