Watch Will Smith’s Jaw-Dropping Ride With Rimac Founder Mate Rimac
When Will Smith visited Croatia last week, he didn’t get handed off to a brand ambassador or a professional driver for hire. Mate Rimac — the founder and CEO of Rimac — personally took the wheel of a Nevera and put the Hollywood A-lister through a high-speed run on home turf. That distinction matters more than it might first appear.
The Nevera is already one of the most extreme production cars on the planet. But when the man who built the company from a garage project into a hypercar and technology powerhouse decides to personally chauffeur a global celebrity, it signals something beyond a standard PR moment. This was Rimac making a statement — about the car, about Croatia, and about how seriously he takes the Nevera’s place in the hypercar conversation.
What The Nevera Actually Does At Full Tilt
For anyone who hasn’t experienced the Nevera’s numbers up close, a quick reminder of what Smith was sitting in: 1,888 horsepower, four electric motors, one for each wheel, and a 0–60 mph time of under 1.97 seconds. Top speed is rated at 258 mph. Those figures don’t just make it one of the quickest production EVs ever built — they put it in a conversation with the fastest road-legal cars of any powertrain.
The all-wheel-drive torque vectoring system, which Rimac developed in-house, gives the car a precision that raw power numbers alone don’t capture. Each motor can be individually controlled, which means the Nevera doesn’t just accelerate — it manages that acceleration with a surgical accuracy that a conventional hypercar drivetrain can’t match. For a passenger in the right seat, the experience is reportedly unlike anything else in production.
Rimac Behind The Wheel Is The Detail That Changes Everything
Celebrity ride-alongs happen regularly across the hypercar world. Manufacturers arrange track days, hand over keys to brand ambassadors, and let famous faces post the footage. What happened in Croatia was structurally different. Mate Rimac is not a test driver — he is the founder who bootstrapped this company, built the battery technology that now powers Bugatti’s road cars, and turned a Croatian startup into one of the most consequential names in high-performance electrification. Him choosing to personally drive Smith is the equivalent of Enzo Ferrari deciding to take a passenger out himself.
It also reflects a pattern Rimac has maintained since the company’s early days: staying hands-on and publicly visible with the product. He has driven the Nevera extensively in public-facing contexts, and his willingness to put himself in the driver’s seat for a moment like this reinforces that the car’s performance claims aren’t being kept at arm’s length from the people making them.
Croatia As More Than A Backdrop
The location isn’t incidental. Rimac Automobili is headquartered in Sveta Nedelja, just outside Zagreb, and Croatia has become increasingly central to the brand’s identity. The company ran its second annual Rimac Trailblazers Tour along the Dalmatian Coast in June 2026, and a Nevera owner completed a 1,680-mile drive from the UK to Croatia around the same time — a trip that doubled as a real-world endurance demonstration for the platform.
For Rimac, hosting Smith in Croatia and personally driving him through that landscape is a deliberate brand statement. This isn’t a car that gets shipped to Monaco or Malibu for celebrity cameos. The Nevera belongs to its home country, and Rimac is making sure that association sticks.
Only 150 Neveras are being built. With a price tag in the neighborhood of $2.4 million and a waitlist that closed well before deliveries began, the people who own one already know what they have. What moments like this do is remind everyone else — including the kind of global audience that follows Will Smith — that the most serious electric hypercar in the world was built in Croatia, by a founder who still drives it himself.
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