This has to be one of the coolest maps featuring Croatia that I have ever seen.
A map of global car dealerships for Croatia’s only car producer. There are more global dealerships for Rimac Automobilii than the number of cars that the company has ever produced. Think about that for the moment.
And even though the number of dealerships is growing, this will not be the case for long, as the Rimac C_Two goes into production.
The map was posted by CEO Mate Rimac on his latest Facebook post yesterday. In an age where leaders are being banned for allegedly inciting violence, Rimac uses the tool extremely effectively to update people on progress, as well as to clear up misconceptions and misunderstandings, as is the case in his latest post, which is published in full below.
You can follow Mate Rimac on Facebook.
Something I wanted to clear up for a long time. During an interview with our Head of Sales a couple of years ago, a journalist misinterpreted (mistakenly or not) that the C_Two is sold out. That was not the case and still isn’t, but has been repeated in many articles as a fact.
While it is not unusual for hypercars to be sold-out before they go into production, that is usually only the case for established brands, like Ferrari. The C_Two has many ‘firsts’ – first all-electric-hypercar (globally homologated), first series-production car of Rimac (a new and still relatively unknown brand) etc. It is a completely new market (there are no competitors in production yet) and nobody knows how customers will really react. Customers are very interested in the car but want to see how things play out – they want to try it before committing and see reviews. We are fully in line with that and have never pushed customers to commit before trying the car. There are, of course, many who trusted us enough and liked the car so much to pay a deposit very early on.
So far, only a few customers had the chance to try the C_Two (like Nico Rosberg for example). That is the case for several reasons – while we have made lots of prototypes already, we need every second of them for development, testing and homologation. It is always difficult to squeeze in customer test drives as it impacts testing. Also, the car is still in development so we don’t want the customer to experience glitches or some rough edges that will be improved in the production car. The COVID situation makes traveling hard so that is another factor that is slowing things down.
Let’s not forget that we still didn’t present the production version with the new name – which we will do soon. In parallel, there will be lots of independent reviews coming, from top journalists/YouTubers from all over the world. We are currently building 3 marketing/sales cars that will be used for unveiling the production car, media test-drives, events world-wide (they will go on a world tour, despite the situation) and customer tests.
Nevertheless, we are very happy with how sales are progressing. What I can say is that we are sold-out for at least the first year of production, which was our initial goal – that sales are always at least 12 months ahead of production.
I was never scared of not selling the cars – I am sure that there will be more demand than the 150-unit limit that we have set ourselves. What I am working day and night on is to make sure that the car is as perfect as possible – and that it (over)delivers everything that we have promised – acceleration, features, top speed, range… If we get that right (and there is no indication that we won’t), I am not worried about selling 150 units. I am pretty sure that all 150 units will be gone soon – after we present the final car, there will be a bunch of independent tests available and customers will have the opportunity to try it. We’ll see.
I really believe that many people (journalists, customers) will be very surprised about the level of technology, performance, comfort and features we have managed to put together as a new company with limited resources. That’s something I can’t wait for – and we are almost there.
Maybe also one thing to clarify – while many customers come directly to us, we as an OEM are actually selling cars to our partners – dealers that are representing us all over the world. There are currently 14 of those and more joining us almost every month. A car is “sold” for us when the dealer orders it – which doesn’t necessarily mean that the dealer has sold it to an end customer. So it might happen that some end-customers, can still get a low VIN number (early delivery), if their local dealer has a slot that is not allocated to an end-user customer.
Hope that this gives some clarity on the situation – just wanted to be open and honest about it as it felt like lying when I see that in articles, while we have actually never said that we are sold out.
For the latest in the Rimac story, follow the dedicated TCN section.
