Riding in the £1m Rimac Concept One

Only eight Rimac Concept One supercars were built. Now, there are only seven after a notorious crash involving Richard Hammond.

Given they are all customer cars, it’s not surprising that I find myself in the passenger rather than driver’s seat for my brief ride in the car, sitting alongside Rimac test driver Miroslav Zrncevic.

Rimac C_Two hypercar revealed 

This car is owned by Paul Runge, an electric car fan and retinal surgeon based in Florida, who is disarmingly relaxed about us taking his car out for a spin. If I’d just bought a £1m supercar, I’d be keeping a tight hold on the keys.

I’ve heard plenty about the Concept One, most notably its 0-62mph time of a hairy 2.5sec. That’s faster than a McLaren P1 and Ferrari LaFerrari.

Still, despite the figures, it’s easy to be sceptical of these fairly unknown electric supercar brands coming out of the woodwork (think Vanda Dendrobium, Nio EP9), with plenty of raucous claims on performance that surpass the established brands. This very car took a long time to come to fruition; it was first seen in 2011 at the Frankfurt motor show.

But it’s also an exciting time, because often these are the companies that are pushing the boundaries of what can be done with electric cars, not constrained by price or selling to the masses like so many mainstream car makers.

Before getting in the car, chief operating officer Monika Mikac told me about how Rimac built its own infotainment system – not because the company wanted to but because it got quoted a huge €20m for buying a system from a supplier – and how impressive it is. My initial thought was: impressive, schimpressive. There’s plenty of decent infotainment systems out there and plenty of mediocre ones; this will fit into one of those categories. I was wrong. Everything you can think of is accessible via this Rimac touchscreen. Choose your torque distribution between the front and rear? Yes. Overlay graphs on power, motor speed and torque from a period of time? You can. Raise your suspension for a speed bump? Sure. You get the idea. It’s damn impressive.

So, let’s get to the good bit. We’re on a private estate near Monterey, California, which gives Zrncevic the perfect excuse to show me quite what this beast is capable of.

The electric Concept One is a 1224bhp car with a combined torque figure of 1180lb ft. It has four motors, one on each wheel, making it four-wheel drive. The powertrain also enables all-wheel torque vectoring, with each wheel able to accelerate or decelerate a hundred times per second – that’s something else you can witness on the infotainment system.