When your clientele has millions to burn on a hypercar, the sky’s the limit when it comes to charging buyers for optional features. Bugatti Rimac CEO Mate Rimac has a wild idea to bundle a fuel station with the purchase of a car. The genius behind the Nevera and the Concept One electric hypercars isn’t ruling out making it easier for owners to fill up their combustion-engine cars from home.
The 36-year-old Croatian entrepreneur believes the ICE still has a long future. Maybe not with fossil fuels as he suggests those stations could be filled up with synthetic fuel instead. Speaking at the Financial Times’ Future of the Car Summit in London, Rimac shared his vision: “You could even make some beautiful Bugatti fuel stations for the homes of owners, using synthetic fuels.”
It doesn’t come as a surprise the company’s head honcho brought up the subject of synthetic fuels. Porsche, which owns 45 percent of Bugatti Rimac, has been making eFuel at a pilot plant in Chile since December 2022. It’s produced from water and carbon dioxide with wind energy, enabling an internal combustion engine to have a nearly CO2-neutral operation.
The plant aims to make around 14.5 million gallons annually by the middle of the decade and ramp up production to 145 million gallons by 2027. That would still be a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things seeing as how there are roughly 1.4 billion cars on the road today. However, you have to start from somewhere, right?
Rimac didn’t mention the Porsche connection but it wouldn’t be such an outlandish idea to put eFuel in a Bugatti some years from now. After all, these cars are built in limited numbers (450 Veyrons and 500 Chirons) and their owners barely drive them anyway, so the demand wouldn’t be that high.
On a related note, Bugatti’s next hypercar will premiere on June 20 and is touted as being a truly all-new model. Rimac said that not one piece has been carried over from the Nevera or Chiron. He went on to mention it’ll have an evolutionary exterior design combined with “some crazy things” inside where there’ll be a boost in quality.
The pièce de résistance will definitely be the new V-16 engine pictured above. It’s a naturally aspirated powerhouse nearly 40 inches long. Rimac said it’s a completely new engine that Bugatti intends to use “for a while.” Its lifespan is likely to extend beyond 2035 when the European Union’s sales ban on new cars that have harmful emissions will kick in, provided that’s still happening. An exemption for vehicles running on synthetic fuel has already been included, following pressure made by Germany.
That encourages elite brands for the ultra-rich to continue investments in combustion engines. Mate Rimac himself said the electric Nevera still isn’t sold out because high-end customers typically prefer ICE power. Aston Martin recently announced a new twin-turbo V-12 packing 824 horsepower and 738 pound-feet, so it’s safe to say conventional, large-displacment engines are not going away anytime soon.