Rimac Throws Down Gauntlet With Unlimited-Mileage Battery Warranty

Croatian battery-electric hypercar maker Rimac is offering an unlimited-mileage warranty on its cars’ power packs in recognition that miles driven affect the technology’s performance much less than age.

While its eight-year warranty is matched by some other BEV makers, the unlimited-mileage cover throws down the gauntlet to manufacturers such as Tesla, which has seen many commercially operated examples of its vehicles run up very high mileage in a short space of time with little adverse effect on battery health.

Rimac’s warranty will be applied to all cars delivered so far on top of new purchases, providing Nevera owners an additional seven years of warranty cover for the liquid-cooled 120-kWh battery pack which was designed, engineered and manufactured in-house.

Made to deliver 1.4 MW of power, the Nevera battery pack uses an H-shaped design as opposed to the more usual flat-floor skateboard style arrangement. This allows driver and passenger to sit as low as possible in the car, rather than having sit "on top" of a skateboard-style pack.

The Rimac team created a lithium manganese nickel battery chemistry, with water-glycol cooling plates. Significantly, they say, these cooling plates sandwich the cells, rather than simply be at the top or the bottom, to provide consistent and efficient cooling across the whole pack.

The Nevera claims an operating range of up to 305 miles (491 km) on a single charge and can charge at 500 kW, a speed so rapid that only a handful of public chargers with this capability currently exist. The automaker says its warranty covers all major faults of the battery pack and includes a guarantee that at the end of the warranty period the battery will still have a total charge capacity that is 75% of that when it was delivered new.

Hendrik Malinowski, Bugatti Rimac commercial director, says: “A lot of mass-market electric vehicle (manufacturers) cover their electric vehicle batteries for around eight years, limiting mileage to roughly the 100,000-mile (161,000-km) mark. So, for us, with one of the most advanced high-performance battery packs in the world, to extend our warranty to eight years and unlimited miles is hugely significant. The Nevera is not just extremely fast, capable and luxurious but also easy to own and this move is the latest affirmation of that.”