Image: Bugatti
Porsche wants to own a huge chunk of Croatian electric supercar manufacturer Rimac, and it is willing to go to some pretty great lengths to make that happen. For one thing, Rimac is scheduled to go public next year with a valuation of $6.06 billion. According to a report from Germany’s Manager Magazin, the deal won’t be straight cash, but a joint venture between the Germans and the Croats. Together Porsche and Rimac will take over Bugatti with Rimac holding a controlling stake of the French hypercar builder. Rimac will get 55 percent of Bugatti, while Porsche will gain 45 percent of the joint.
This could be a great venture for all parties involved, as each brings a piece of the puzzle to the table. Porsche has the business sense and profitability to run this business venture in a way that won’t lose its ass. Rimac has the electric know-how to engineer super fast machines with zero emissions. Bugatti has the precision engineering and high-end name that all three need to make a multimillion dollar electric hypercar sell.
Back in September of 2020 we first heard word of the potential for this deal to go through.
Porsche already owns a 24 percent stake in Rimac, while Hyundai owns another 14 percent. Porsche, back in September, was looking to increase its stake to 49 percent. Volkswagen AG, meanwhile, is looking for a way to cleanly sever ties with Bugatti as it is a massive expense on the budget sheets and doesn’t really tie up with the company’s ambitions to go all-electric. With Porsche owning a lot of Rimac and Bugatti, and Porsche having merged with VAG, the German giant will still have its grubby little mitts in the Bugatti pie, even if it doesn’t have direct control anymore.
It isn’t exactly clear when this will all go down, but Reuters has reported it as happening “soon,” so perhaps within the next year or so.
Believe it or not, by the time this all goes down, it will have been nearly a decade since Porsche launched the 918 Spyder hybrid hypercar. With that in mind, maybe this will be the perfect opportunity for Porsche to launch a new carbon monocoque electric monster to really put its mark on the EV sports car space. While there are already a handful of these kinds of things on sale, including from Rimac itself, none have the high-speed expertise of Bugatti backing them up, or the sports car excellence we have all come to expect from Porsche.
Still riding in the churning wake of the Dieselgate scandal from a few years ago, Volkswagen is in the midst of a massive push toward electrification. Bugatti currently produces the Chiron and Divo, both of which are big, fast, heavy, expensive, and consume gasoline like it’s Capri Sun at my 13th birthday party. None of those things are very copacetic with VW’s plans for the future. There are rumors that the company wants to find new owners for Bugatti, Lamborghini, and Ducati, at a minimum. So, yeah, this move would be a great one for all parties involved. I look forward to seeing how it actually shakes out. Bring on 2022!