Rimac Robotaxi! Bugatti CEO’s ‘Verne’ Ready To Take On Tesla

What does Mate Rimac – the Bugatti CEO who’s currently in the limelight for launching a new hypercar with a V16 engine – do in his spare time?

Why, he teams up with a couple of buddies to solve the thorny issue of autonomous ride-hailing services of course.

Enter Verne, a new company that Rimac and co. have founded to: design and build a fully autonomous electric vehicle that offers Rolls-Royce levels of luxury; to re-envision ride-hailing apps with added personalisation; and to create the infrastructure that keeps these ‘cars’ clean and charged and running nearly 24/7.

Now, you might scoff, but the rise of Rimac (both that of the company and its founder) has been meteoric, going from unheard of Croatian start-up to a supplier of batteries and motors to the likes of BMW and Porsche. Mate himself is now CEO of Bugatti, too.

Will Verne be another homerun for Rimac? Has it stolen a march on Tesla’s forthcoming robotaxi? Top Gear’s Associate Editor, Tom Ford, has been to Croatia to find out…

CHAPTERS

00:00 Intro
00:59 Walkaround with Chief Design Officer Adriano Mudri
07:26 Interior
12:31 Interview with CEO Marko Pejković
18:51 Interview with founder Mate Rimac
23:41 Conclusion

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[danijelhrup]

Dude Rimac ten years ago had one car and garage... 10 years later!!!

[VFPnkQT]

I've seen dozens of similar concepts. The problem is implementing it in the real world, for a showroom.

[niklaswejedal]

the irony: that looks like something I would like to DRIVE...

[learningcameras]

The comments lol! This is a Taxi, no one is forcing you to sell your M3 for one of these

[p.a.]

It looks like cars in Demolition Man !
The future of the past...

[OneManOnFire]

As someone who works in the autonomous car industry. I've been in a total of 3 different driverless cars on public roads. It takes a lot of engineers to write code for these cars.

[lukavujeva]

A dream coming true. Imagine you take off from the plan from your business trip, entering this car, not having a rude stinking driver who does not understand a word, you need to repeat the address 10 times, wants to rip you off, lies that he can only accept cash because his card machine is broken, etc. (This is our reality in Germany now and it happened to me many times).

[littlesaigondulichsinhhoat]

besides the talking any footage of the full self driving, demo in action? fsd is the hardest part of robo taxi.

[ilmelangolo]

This totally recalls me about "Total Recall"...

[raphymartinez]

Anyone can show these ideas. Pretty disappointed that they couldn't show a functional demo model, even in a parking lot.

[DouglasJWalker]

The thought of "will you send your child to school in one" should be the first question thought of.

[BilalSattar]

they talked about everything except how the car will actually drive itself. isn't that the most important part for all of this?

[SynthiaVan]

It would be wild if there was a lidar network that autonomous cars all tied into, like at intersections and on street lights. A full 3d picture for the car to use.

[dmc]

“Oh, it has a decent size boot”, “Yes, it has a big trunk!” Very funny scene😂

[miketaylor]

Everytime I hear about autonomous cars I think of the robot taxi from Total Recall lol.

[bdcarlitosway]

But can it outsmart a cone placed on the hood?

[BilalSattar]

"we are not focused on that" the ceo on the self driving part 😂

[_downunderdutch]

Would be good if the trunk opens a bit slower ..

[entertainingandfun]

Top gear production team is making some incredible content recently. Everything flows perfectly. Really impressed! Out of nowhere I suddenly find myself coming to top gear first once more. I hope someone at top gear sees this

[kimb]

I can just imagine everyone racing to use the robotaxi because some celebrity released an album.