Acceleration times, especially in the hypercar segment, are crazy. You can easily hit 60 miles per hour (96 kilometers per hour) from a standstill in around two seconds in a number of production vehicles. This is not enough, some might say, and we are happy to report the limits in terms of acceleration haven’t been reached yet. At least according to an engineer from Rimac.
Rimac is a Croatian hypercar manufacturer that has close ties with Bugatti. The Nevera, the company’s latest and greatest product, can safely sprint to 60 mph (96 kph) in 1.85 seconds but one of Rimac’s leading engineers believes production cars can do the acceleration in under one second.
Gallery: 2023 Rimac Nevera First Drive Review
When The Drive asked Matija Renic, Rimac Nevera’s Chief Program Engineer, whether 0-to-60 acceleration is possible in one second or less, he simply said: “Below one second.” We can’t explain how quick that actually is – theory says that one second is exactly "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom." If you allow us to put that number into perspective, the fastest human sprinters run just 10 meters in a second when at full speed.
Mind you, we are talking about production vehicles here. Dedicated drag racing cars can do this at the track with slicks but it seems that traction on the street will be the deciding factor. The Nevera electric hypercar is very close to this mind-blowing achievement, but Renic says the vehicle wasn’t built only with acceleration in mind. It’s much more than that.
"The car is very fast, honestly," Renic told The Drive. "Figures here and there, we are very proud of them, but the car is more than that. It’s not a one-trick pony, it’s not a dragster that you take to the drag strip and achieve the best times, and that’s it. The car is actually very, very complex, showing you what automotive technology in the future can do. And it’s also very usable and very friendly from the user's perspective.”
