vention was a glove that replaced a
yboard and mouse. It took him to
uth Korea for a global competition
which he won a gold medal.
His second invention was an adapt-
le mirror to cover blind spots in cars.
made enough money from it to buy
s first car when he turned 18: a 1984
W.
“I was just totally insane about cars,”
says. “I started to race it.” It didn’t go
ll. “Pretty much immediately the en-
e blew up.” What could he do? He
w it was possible to swop out the en-
gine for a more powerful one. But he
didn’t have the funds.
“So I started with forklift components.
I had a forklift motor, some old batteries,
some electronics.” Two years later that
car beat the Tesla. How?
There’s an idea that all that matters
about a battery is how much energy it
stores. The more kilowatt-hours it packs
in, the further it can take a car – and the
more likely it is that people will choose it
in preference to a petrol alternative. That
may be true for your standard hybrid. If
you have an Opel Ampera, say, it uses a
battery for the low-performance work
around town and then the petrol kicks
in when you really need
it on the motorway.
However, for a car like
an Aston Martin Valky-
rie the reverse is true.
The V12 petrol engine is that of your con-
ventional supercar. It goes vroom and it
goes fast – for a 20th-century car. So far,
so traditional. What makes it a hypercar- in the car industry’s adjective inflation
- is the change that happens when you
really need the extra oomph, when the
vroom of the petrol isn’t enough. That’s
when the battery – designed, as it hap-
pens, by Rimac – takes over, giving in-
stant torque. And this extra vroom is, like
all electric propulsion, silent.
The battery that provides it isn’t that
different in capacity from the one taking
Opel drivers on their commute. What’s
different is its power, the rate at which it
can release that energy. That was what
‘It’s faster than anything else I’ve driven,
by a huge, huge margin’
, ,
geeky adult inventor, the least intimidat-
ing bit of it’s the flesh and blood man
standing in front of me.
He’s wearing tight denim shorts, blue
trainers and a shabby T-shirt. Marta
takes one look at him and then sends
him home to change, pointing out that
when Elon Musk does interviews he
wears a suit.
Mate doesn’t, for the record, like being
compared to Musk – and has refused to
meet him until he has a company he
feels he can be proud of.
“I love the guy. He;s created a company
that has 30 000 employees, he’s sending
rockets to Mars and he’s doing these in-credible things. We haven’t achieved 1%
of what he’s achieved, so I don’t think it’s
fair to even be mentioned in the same
sentence as Elon.”
Still, that doesn’t mean he can’t look as
slick as him. Or, at the very least, change
his denim shorts.
While today he’s viewed as a hero, it
was initially difficult for him adjusting to
life in Croatia.
“The kids were totally different. Bos-
nians are viewed as... Well, some people
have an irrational thing against them.
This made it really difficult for me.”
It’s difficult to be viewed as a hick
though when you’re winning interna-
tional technology competitions. His firststory. In the reception his career is chart-
ed on display boards, beginning with the
inventions that won awards while he was
still at school.
A passion for cars is the first part of
that story. Because Mate wants to make
one thing absolutely clear. He doesn’t
make electric cars because he thinks
they’ll save the world. He makes them
because that’s how you make the best
cars. “I’m a petrolhead,” he says. “I was
crazy about making fast cars.”
As a boy, Mate also knew of another
Balkan engineer. Nikola Tesla, after
whom Tesla cars was named, was origi-
nally from Croatia. He developed the
alternating current electric motor – a
beautifully simple invention that pro-
vides instant power with little waste.
“I was always fascinated by its perfor-
mance and efficiency. And I was think-
ing, ‘Why is nobody using an electric mo-
tor to power a car?’ I thought, I’ll do
something totally crazy, that nobody has
done, and build an electric race car.”B
E F O R E w e’re
scheduled to
meet, Marta
Longin, his pub-
licist, offers us a
tour of the company, where
his 550 employees are working on the
successor to the car that Richard Ham-
mond destroyed. She complains she’ll be
working late. The prime minister of Cro-
atia, Andrej Plenkovic, is due to visit the
next morning to find out how his coun-
try of four million people can emulate
Mate’s success. It’s easy to see why: when
Hyundai invested, Mate received the
backing of a company with a turnover
twice Croatia’s GDP.
All of this makes him a Croatian na-
tional hero. Albeit, in person, an initially
underwhelming one. When he finally
meets us it’s in front of his vanity wall
displayingthetimelineofhisprogress(From previous page)ABOVE and ABOVE RIGHT: The company’s future
hung in the balance after Richard Hammond crashed
one of its cars in Switzerland in 2017. RIGHT: The
motoring presenter was left with serious injuries.
82 | 8 AUGUST 2019 you.co.za