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Croatian Rimac acquires a majority stake in the manufacturer of highly exclusive sports cars.
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After more than five years of searching, Volkswagen has finally found a buyer for its most exclusive subsidiary, Bugatti. The Croatian manufacturer of electric supercars and bicycles Rimac will acquire 55 percent of the shares. The remaining 45 percent is passed on to the Volkswagen group to the sports car subsidiary Porsche.
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Volkswagen and Rimac have not disclosed financial details of the deal. The financial situation at Bugatti has been one of the auto industry’s best-kept secrets for the past two decades.
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©AFP
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Volkswagen did not report results for Bugatti separately, but analysts strongly took into account that Bugatti has never been profitable due to exorbitant development costs and low production numbers. On Monday, a Porsche spokesman said it was “consistently positive results” without wanting to explain.
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Piëch
With the sale of Bugatti, the Volkswagen group further puts an end to the multi-brand empire that Ferdinand Piëch made of the Volkswagen group in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to the volume producers Volkswagen, Audi, Seat and Skoda, the VW group under Piëch also bought ailing luxury brands such as Lamborghini, Bentley and the motorcycle brand Ducati. By letting those brands shop for parts at the immense Volkswagen mother, attractive profits could also be made with small sales numbers.
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The pinnacle of that strategy was the 1998 reincarnation of the legendary French sports car brand Bugatti, which was defunct in the 1950s. That was given carte blanche to make the fastest car in the world.
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20,000 euros for a set of tires
The development of what eventually became the Veyron was an obstacle course to say the least. But in the end the Veyron was at the dealer with an official maximum speed of just over 408 kilometers per hour. To cope with these extreme speeds, Michelin has developed special tires. A replacement set of four pieces cost more than 20,000 euros.
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Since the departure of Piëch and his team Martin Winterkorn, the luxury daughters in general and Bugatti in particular have lost their protected position. With annual sales of no more than 80 cars worth more than 1 million euros each, the market remained limited, especially after more and more other brands started making ‘hypercars’.
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The sale at Volkswagen has not been very successful for the time being. Lamborghini and Ducati were both up for grabs, but Wolfsburg eventually withdrew the sale at the end of last year due to lack of interest.
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With Rimac, Bugatti now gets an illustrious new owner. The Croatian company is still largely owned by its 33-year-old founder Mate Rimac. The story goes that when he was 19 he disassembled a BMW 3-series and fitted it with an electric motor.
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Eight customers
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© Rimac
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Since then, he has been working on developing an electric super sports car. The Concept One went on sale in 2013. Rimac eventually found eight buyers for it in just over a year. This year, the successor to the Concept One, the Nevera, should be delivered to the first customers. This electric sports car has a top speed of 412 kilometers per hour and an electric motor with 1,912 hp. Other car companies such as Porsche and Hyundai are now shareholders in Rimac.
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Man’s inexhaustible energy to make e-bikes and yachts in addition to electric cars earned Mate Rimca the nickname ‘Elon Musk of the Balkans’. Rimac said on Monday that he is certainly in favor of making electric cars at Bugatti as well.
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