Rimac’s new electric hypercar can go 0–60 faster than it takes to read this headline

Let’s dispense with the hyperbole: Croatia’s Rimac Automobili built a very, very fast car that they’d like to show you. It is an all-electric hypercar called the Concept Two that debuted today at the Geneva Motor Show. It claims to have a 1,914-horsepower engine that enables a 0 to 60 mph acceleration in 1.85 seconds. That would make it one of the quickest cars in existence, quicker than the next-generation Tesla Roadster with its comparatively sluggish 0–60 in 1.9 seconds.

These are crazy sounding specs and you would not be remiss if you read all of this with a healthy degree of skepticism. That said,Rimac’s Concept One, circa 2012, fed on 1,073 horsepower from its four electric motors, and could best most supercars on the drag strip. Which is to say, Rimac knows fast.

Rimac says its 120 kWh battery enables over 400 miles of range, which is a lot more than the 200 miles found in most production EVs. And facial recognition technology will both unlock and start the car, which makes this car the perfect distillation of our current moment of technology and hype.

The company claims that it’ll get to 100 mph in 4.3 seconds and run a quarter mile in 9.1 seconds. The C Two tops out at 258 mph, but after a certain point these are just numbers on a screen, right? All this speed and horsepower starts to get a little abstract, and that abstraction can be a little dangerous if not handled correctly. Just ask Richard Hammond, who is very lucky to have walked away from the burning wreckage of the Rimac Concept One while shooting his television show The Grand Tour last year.

If speed isn’t your thing, Rimac says the car comes with Level 4 autonomous capabilities. The sensor suite includes eight cameras, one or two LIDAR, six radar, 12 ultrasonics, and a partridge in a pear tree. Again, Level 4 is an easy claim to make when you don’t have the immediate concern of independent verification. In other words, we’ll believe it when we see it.

And we probably won’t because the chances you or me or anyone we know will ever end up behind the wheel of the Concept Two are exactly zero. The company won’t say how much the C Two costs, but you can count on it being seven-figures. Rimac said it will build 150 copies of the Concept Two, which would be a massive output compared to the eight copies it sold of the original.

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