Croatian electric sports car producer Rimac recently put its new C_Two hypercar through a series of rigorous crash tests in order to create an extremely safe hypercar that the company claims will cost around $2 million.
Research and development into the car’s safety was a focus of Rimac. The car has an anticipated top speed of 258 MPH (412 KMH), so the company has been especially focused on the safety of the driver and passengers in the event of a crash. “Our supercomputers are running 24/7 to improve the performance of our car for safety and stiffness,” Rimac’s Computer-Aided Engineer Gustavo Andrade said.
The C_Two is a marvel of electric vehicle engineering. Each of the vehicle’s wheels will operate with its own permanent-magnet synchronous motor, as well as its own gearbox. Each motor will be liquid-cooled. The 120 kWh battery will give owners around 400 miles of range as well. Rimac claims that the car can accelerate from a standstill to 100 KMH in 1.85 seconds, and also that the car completed two consecutive laps at the Nürburgring racetrack in Germany without any significant drop in performance.
Rimac’s C_Two hypercar has been in development for around three years and has undergone thousands of crash simulations on Rimac’s computers. Director of Vehicle Engineering Daniele Giachi said that it is crucial to generate detailed models of the vehicle before sending it to real-world testing. The cost of a production model of the vehicle is expected to be around €1.795 million, so it would not be effective or logical for Rimac to crash test with the C_Two. “The goal is to have the most perfect correlation between real and virtual testing in order to minimize the risk when you go to crash a prototype that costs one million Euros,” Daniele Giachi said.
The car has gone through a lengthy process with physical crash tests, starting with experimental prototypes. After testing them and coming up with the best options, they then choose on a single prototype body style to test, making adjustments to it frequently and finally deciding on a pre-production model that would be most advantageous to test.
There are obviously bumps in the road and unexpected difficulties when testing a new prototype, and the Rimac C_Two is no exception. “Nobody can promise one hundred percent success for the first time. Sometimes things go wrong,” Andrade said. During the first round of testing, an unexpected movement from the vehicle’s rail proved to be disastrous during testing. The team had to go back to the drawing board as none of the computer simulations predicted the error. The development team was able to recognize the error and produce a new prototype that would prevent it from happening.
Daniele Giachi noted that the company tends to test both virtual and real-world models excessively in order to produce the safest car possible. “Because many things can go wrong is the reason why we do many rounds of testing and because of this the team needs to be ready to react to this negative result with proactivity, finding new solutions for the issue we encountered.”
Watch Rimac’s crash test on its new C_Two below: