Rimac postpones delivery date of the C_Two til 2021

The first examples of the second hypercar from the Croatian electric car manufacturer Rimac Automobili, presented for the first time at the Geneva Motor Show 2018 under the designation C_Two, will not be delivered to customers this year, but only in 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

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To speed up development, Rimac has put a new production line into operation for the construction of prototypes. The new line at the Veliko plant Trgovišće will now be used to build the prototypes required for “final validation and crash tests for worldwide homologation”, Rimac said in the press release.

By manufacturing on a single line instead of the previous “nest production”, the sports car manufacturer wants to halve the assembly time; according to Rimac, the production of a C_Two now takes five weeks. At full capacity, it should later be possible to build four customer vehicles per month.

The long production times are partly the reason why the delivery of customer vehicles was postponed to 2021: Four prototypes already exist, but 13 more vehicles are needed for the tests, followed by ten more pre-series cars.

Concerning validation and crash tests, company founder Mate Rimac says: “The only way to do this is through a rigorous crash test process that requires many different prototypes, each with its purpose. While some cars go directly from the production line to the crash test facility, others are used for various validation tests before they too are driven against the wall”. Only “a handful of prototypes” will survive the test phase. “As we are ramping up prototype production, this new line is an absolutely necessary investment to streamline the process, and it will help us deliver customer cars from next year,” says Rimac.

The final design of the C_Two and also the official name will be announced later this year.

Update 22 December 2020: After Rimac Automobili postponed deliveries of the first examples of its second e-hypercar C_Two until 2021 due to the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, pre-series production has now started with the first six vehicles almost ready for series production.

The new production line at the Rimac plant in Veliko Trgovišće was previously used to manufacture twelve prototypes of the over 1.4 MW electric supercar for the extensive testing program and validation and crash tests.

The pre-series cars will be used for the “final tweaks,” Rimac says before full-scale production begins. The company that counts Porsche to its financial backers remains positive to start delivering the hypercars in the coming year.

Additional reporting by Nora Manthey.

rimac-automobili.com, rimac-automobili.com (update 22 December)