There are few people on earth for whom a Bugatti Chiron is a company car, and fewer still who would leave the keys in one out of habit. Mate Rimac is that man. The 36-year-old Croatian engineer, who built an electric hypercar empire from a garage and now runs Bugatti alongside his own Rimac Group, has never shown much interest in the ceremonial trappings of wealth. What he is interested in—as the world discovered this week—is getting his car back.
The facts, as they have emerged, read like a caper scripted by someone with no interest in plausibility. A man reportedly arrived at Rimac's campus near Zagreb seeking work. Somewhere during that visit, he found the Chiron—a seven-figure machine, roughly $3 million by most estimates—with its keys left inside, as they habitually were. He drove it away. Rimac, upon discovering the theft, did not wait for a chauffeur or a helicopter. He got into his Porsche 911 and gave chase.
The Pursuit: Croatia to the A9
The pursuit crossed borders. The thief made it out of Croatia and into Austria, where the car was eventually stopped on the A9 motorway, the main north-south artery linking Graz and Linz. Police, meanwhile, were tracking the Chiron through its live telematics data—a detail that says as much about modern hypercars as it does about modern policing. The whole affair was resolved in hours, not days.
It is the kind of story that sounds implausible until you consider the man at its center. Most CEOs in his position would have delegated the recovery to a security team and issued a statement. Rimac grabbed the keys to a 911 and drove.
The Man Behind the Wheel
What lingers is the human detail that surfaced afterward: Rimac reportedly found the man and, rather than indulging any appetite for retribution, offered him a lift home. It is an almost absurd gesture, and yet it fits the profile of a man who has spent his career building things rather than collecting them.
This is, after all, the same Mate Rimac who took a company that began with a converted BMW E30 and turned it into the supplier that beat out Chinese manufacturers and larger established suppliers to land BMW's battery business. The same man who now confirms Rimac is working with BMW on two more cars. The same man who, as Bugatti CEO, has been openly teasing a manual, non-hybrid V16 Tourbillon—a decision that tells you everything about how he thinks about driving.
Engineering Over Enshrinement
Because that is the thread running through the whole story. A man who leaves the keys in his Chiron is a man who believes cars are meant to be driven, not enshrined. A man who chases a thief in a 911 rather than dispatching a security detail is a man who still trusts his own hands on a wheel. And a CEO who publicly argues that competing with China on cost alone won't work—that the only viable path is to build things worth paying for—is a CEO who understands that the romance of the automobile is not a marketing line but an engineering mandate.
The Chiron is back where it belongs. The alleged thief is in custody. And Mate Rimac, one suspects, has already returned to the work that actually occupies him: battery contracts, V16 valve trains, and the stubborn conviction that the future of the hypercar is being written by people who would rather drive one than merely own it.
