Mate Rimac’s Stolen Bugatti Chiron Kept Reporting Its Own Position

At about 4:23 p.m. on Wednesday, a man in dark clothes walked up to a dark Bugatti Chiron parked outside the Rimac campus near Zagreb, looked around, and drove it away. The key was inside the car.

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The campus has no fence. Visitors need a card to get into the buildings, but anyone can walk up to the cars parked outside, and Rimac had left his keys in his cars for years. “So we are in Croatia, which is super, super safe … I am so proud of Croatia being so safe that I am very relaxed, meaning also I leave my keys inside my cars, including the Chiron and [Rimac] Nevera and many other cars. I did it for years and nothing ever happened,” he said in the video he posted on Instagram. Staff move the cars and test things on them while he sits in meetings, so the key in the car saved them from chasing him down. “There is no fence [at the factory]. So the car is outside and the guy walked in and took the car,” he said.

Nobody noticed at first, because the car is shared around the campus. “The craziest thing is we wouldn’t have even noticed because a lot of my friends and colleagues from the company use the car, I don’t even know where it is most of the time,” Rimac said. Someone walked in and said he had seen a stranger driving the Chiron, and a group chat of Rimac’s friends worked out that none of them had it. Rimac called the police, and his team opened the car’s telemetry feed.

Location, speed and fuel level arrived in the feed. “I immediately called the police, and they arrived fast. At the same time, we were checking the telemetry data, which sends the location, fuel level, speed, and everything else. I saw the car heading towards Slovenia,” Rimac said. His Porsche 911 was parked beside him with a full tank, and he set off after a car that already had an hour on him. Rimac founded Rimac Automobili in 2009, and he now runs Bugatti Rimac, the joint venture formed in 2021 in which Rimac Group holds 55 percent and Porsche, which built the 911, holds 45 percent.

Rimac watched the Chiron cross Slovenia and enter Austria at Spielfeld while the fuel gauge kept falling. He hoped the driver would be caught at a petrol station when the tank ran low. “I guess he didn’t pay for the fuel; he just filled up half the tank and continued onwards,” he said. An Austrian police officer had joined the group chat by then, receiving the car’s position as it moved. “One of the officers was in our group chat, had an update on the location all the time, and they caught him,” Rimac said.

The Styrian police notice, published the next morning, tells the same afternoon without any of that. It records a Bugatti Chiron worth about three million euros, stolen in the afternoon near Zagreb, driven through Slovenia and into Austria at Spielfeld, and found by motorway police at a petrol station on the A9 near Seiersberg, south of Graz, shortly after 7 p.m. Its recovery, in the notice’s telling, came from intensive manhunt measures and cooperation between Slovenian and Austrian security authorities, and the notice names the motorway police as the officers who found the car.

Rimac had expected a quiet handover at the roadside and had thought he might drive the man back home to his family. Instead he counted about 10 police cars and 20 officers, and the Chiron went onto a flatbed truck because the police wanted more proof that it was his than his identity card and registration papers. He stayed at the police station until the early hours finishing the paperwork, and the car came back with minor damage to its front bumper that can be repaired.

At the station he asked to meet the man, a 36-year-old Croatian who seemed distressed and, in Rimac’s telling, has a difficult past. The man said he had come to the company to ask for a job. “He said he came to the company to ask for a job, ‘but I saw the car and it had a key inside’, like it was my fault,” Rimac said. Rimac will not press charges himself, but the Graz public prosecutor ordered the man reported while remaining at liberty, and Rimac says a theft of this value is prosecuted by the Croatian and Austrian authorities regardless. The Styrian criminal police questioned the man, and the police notice says he confessed in full to the theft and the car has already been returned to its rightful owner. “We will not keep our keys around the factory anymore. That’s the story of the stolen Chiron. Don’t try it; we have all the data, and you can’t do anything with the car without us,” Rimac said in the video.

About three million euros, the Styrian police said, putting the Chiron a quarter above its 2.4 million euro base price, while other coverage has put it at roughly $3.4 million and at as much as $4 million. The police figure is the one the authorities worked from, and it is the figure that turned a recovered car into a prosecution Rimac could not call off even if he had wanted to.

Louis Chiron raced for Bugatti in the 1920s and 1930s and won a Grand Prix in his home town of Monaco, and the car carries his name. Its 8.0-litre W16 engine, with four turbochargers, makes 1,500 PS and 1,600 Nm of torque, and Bugatti limits its top speed to 420 km/h. Bugatti planned 500 Chirons, and all 500 were sold.