Earlier this year, BMW announced that it partnered with Rimac to make the battery pack for the newly facelifted i7. Over the past few years, Rimac has been one of the most impressive makers of high-performance batteries and powertrains, in its record-shattering Nevera supercar. So it’s cool to see BMW look to Rimac for battery help. And that partnership will continue to grow, as the two brands are partnering up on two more cars, according to Auto News, although neither brand will say which cars they’ll be.
Mate Rimac spoke to Auto News about his own projects, the future of Bugatti, and some of the partnerships he’s built with massive brands. “I can talk about the public ones. BMW is a big partner and we have a great partnership. We jointly announced that we are launching the first car with our joint technology, which is the BMW i7,” he said. “There are two more cars in the pipeline that we are doing, but I can’t provide additional details yet.”
Who knows what those cars will be, but “in the pipeline” sounds like they haven’t been announced yet. One of them could be the electric M3, but BMW already revealed the regular i3 and that doesn’t have Rimac battery tech, so it seems unlikely that the M3 would have it. Whatever the two new cars are, though, they’ll likely be joined by the rest of BMW’s lineup eventually. The 7 Series LCI was the first Bimmer to get Rimac tech, so it stands to reason that other BMWs could get similar LCI battery updates.
Rimac’s tech must be worth the upgrade, if BMW is willing to partner up. BMW doesn’t just partner with anyone. It has a reputation for quality, and it’s a reputation BMW apparently takes very seriously.
“BMW is premium. You have to be the best technically and commercially to supply them. They have to be competitive on the market and they cannot pay a premium to get components from a company that’s not optimized,” Rimac said. “To win that business, we had to be better than everyone on the market both technically and commercially. This is especially true with batteries, where competing against China is not easy. We worked more than three years and that relationship developed over time.”
To earn BMW’s trust, Rimac had to do a bit of wooing, to prove that not only did his company have the technology to help BMW, but the ability to manufacture it at scale. At first, BMW was interested in Rimac but wasn’t committed. So Mate Rimac made a bold move to prove his commitment to working with BMW.
“Early in the project, when we had no commitment for the series production, they came here and I showed them the construction site of the campus. It was just the pillars on the dirt. I told them, ‘This is where your production line will be.’ They said, ‘But we don’t have any contracts.’ My reply was, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m building it for you.'”
It was a ballsy move but one that ultimately paid off. Now, Rimac officially has its battery tech inside of the 7 Series, and two more cars are on the way. It’ll be exciting to find out which ones they are.
