BMW And Rimac Are Teaming Up On EV Tech

…but don’t get too excited about the prospect of a 1900bhp EV hypercar with kidney grilles

09 Apr 2024

The car industry can be a funny old place sometimes. When hypercar manufacturers Bugatti and Rimac teamed up a couple of years ago in a joint venture, it was under ownership split 45 and 55 per cent between Porsche and the wider Rimac Group respectively. Porsche itself is of course owned by Volkswagen, which in turn is part-owned by… Porsche (specifically a holding company rather than the automaker itself).

The Rimac Group includes both Bugatti Rimac, which actually builds cars, and Rimac Technology, which produces electric powertrains and interior tech for third parties. The owners of Rimac Group include both Porsche and, just to throw some extra confusion into the mix, Hyundai (although things have been quiet between Rimac and the South Korean company for a while now).

Basically, there’s a complex web of partnerships and ownership stakes at play here, and it’s about to become even more of a brain twister, as now BMW has announced it’s to work with Rimac Technology on electric car tech. So a company part-owned by Porsche is going to collaborate with… BMW? Stranger things have happened, we suppose.

To be clear, this is the Rimac that produces powertrain tech, rather than the one that builds the Nevera hypercar. They’re separate companies, albeit both under the same ownership and both founded by Mate Rimac, so we wouldn’t start betting on a BMW-badged hypercar with a Nevera powertrain.

Rather, the companies will be working together on “high-voltage battery technology for battery-electric vehicles”. Rather than one directly supplying the other, it seems that the two companies will be pooling their resources in a mutually beneficial way as BMW aims to further expand its EV offerings.

Exactly which cars this tech is set to end up in isn’t clear, but it probably won’t be BMW’s upcoming Neue Klasse EVs: it says it’s preparing for the launch of these “separately from the new strategic cooperation” with Rimac Technology. Rather, this tech will end up in cars slated to appear in the second half of the decade.

The first full sentence spoken by an infant Mike was a review of the ride quality of a Volvo 850. It was “Daddy’s car goes bumpy-bump on a bumpy road,” so would probably need proofreading a bit, but it was a start.