Rimac’s Concept_One electric car drag-races a Tesla Model S and LaFerrari

Even Ludicrous mode is no match for Rimac's powertrain.

Jonathan M. Gitlin

Rimac Automobili

As its legion of online fans never cease to remind us, the Tesla Model S P90D is a fast car. Actually, that's selling the electric vehicle a little short. In Ludicrous mode, it's about as quick in a straight line as a McLaren 650S, no mean feat considering that the McLaren weighs 1,800lbs (815kg) less. Until now, if you wanted to go any faster in an EV, you needed to roll your own, Flux Capacitor-style. But even Jonny Smith's quarter-mile EV record may be under threat, courtesy of Rimac's Concept_One.
You may not have heard of Rimac Automobili, but the Croatian company has been impressing us for a while now. We first saw the Concept_One in the paddock at last year's Formula E race in Miami. More recently, we met up with some of its engineers in Colorado at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb; the four-wheel torque vectoring powertrain in Nobuhiro "Monster" Tajima's car is a test-bed for the Concept_One. And Rimac has also been working with Konigsegg on the batteries and power distribution units going into the latter's Regera hybrid hypercar.
We always knew the Concept_One would be fast; it's hard to argue with 1072hp (800kW) and 1180ft-lbs (1600Nm) after all. But thanks to British YouTuber Archie Hamilton, we now know just what that means. Hamilton traveled to Rimac in Croatia and brought along a Tesla Model S P90D (yes, with Ludicrous mode) as well as a rather rarer beast—a Ferrari LaFerrari hybrid:

As you can see from the video, neither Tesla nor LaFerrari have anything to offer the Rimac, which set a best quarter-mile time of 9.92 seconds (still 0.05 seconds off the Flux Capacitor). It looks to us like the all-wheel drive Tesla is almost able to keep the Rimac honest, at least off the line; not bad for a car with almost half the power and an extra 1,000lbs/454kg of mass.
That the LaFerrari gets trounced—twice—is perhaps more surprising. After all, Car and Driver coaxed a 9.8-second quarter-mile out of Ferrari's most ferocious vehicle, although the publication notes that it did so under careful scrutiny at Maranello. Although the Tesla and Ferrari never line up together, we think that might be a closer match, at least over the first eighth of a mile. Makes you wonder just how fast the P100D is going to be, doesn't it?