Porsche and Croatian electric car maker Rimac have agreed to set up a joint venture that includes Volkswagen’s high-performance Bugatti brand, officials said on Monday.
The new joint venture – called Bugatti-Rimac – is slated to start in the fourth quarter of this year as a hypercar maker (think high-end sports cars or supercars, but better performing and more exclusive).
Rimac will hold 55% of the shares in the joint venture and Porsche 45% of the shares. Bugatti’s shares will be transferred from Volkswagen, which owns Porsche and Bugatti, to Porsche and then to Rimac, the companies said. Porsche currently also holds a 24% stake in Rimac, up from 10% initially in 2018.
The first planned vehicles are a 1,500-horsepower eight-cylinder Bugatti called the Chiron and a $ 2.4 million all-electric hypercar called the Rimac Nevera, which the company claims has around 1,900 horsepower and can exceed 250 mph. The vehicles had previously been announced separately by the companies.
Bugatti Chiron
Source: Bugatti
“We combine Bugatti’s strong expertise in the hypercar business with Rimac’s enormous innovative strength in the promising field of electromobility,” said Porsche boss Oliver Blume.
Blume called the new joint venture a “perfect combination” in a phone call on Monday.
Blume and Porsche CFO Lutz Meschke become members of the Bugatti-Rimac board. Rimac founder Mate Rimac will lead the joint venture as CEO, the companies announced.
Mate Rimac, who founded the company in his garage in 2009, called the joint venture an “exciting moment” and the combination of the companies “a perfect interaction”.
“I think we can do incredible things,” he told reporters on Monday. “It’s an immense opportunity.”
The companies did not provide financial terms for the new joint venture.
Bugatti-Rimac is expected to employ around 430 people. Of these, 300 are at the company’s headquarters in Croatia, where Rimac is based, and 130 at the Bugatti plant in Molsheim, France. The companies said that all Bugatti models will continue to be produced at the famous facility.