Rimac Energy: Stationary Energy Storage Technology | Hacker News Reader

Rimac Energy: Stationary Energy Storage Technology

rimac-newsroom.com

48 pointssenko38 comments

I really hope for their success, but as usual their announcement is delivered with no substance. Promises of entering a completely new market with few projects in negotiation and already announcing mass production in less than two years...

I could understand they are just fishing for another round of investments to catch up to some masterplan. Extreme expansion and growth without significant results can only result in an explosive burst.

They manufacture EV’s, that is like 98% of the way to a grid storage company.

This kind of diversification makes a lot of sense for EV manufacturers because they can scale battery production without concern for how in demand their cars will be. Actually making significant money isn’t particularly important compared to simply minimizing risks.

Manufacturing EVs is something they have yet to prove themselves in. AFAIK and not sure how many orders/sales they have but not many vehicles were made and delivered.

They have a lot of money to spend and expand due to huge investments, but only thing they successfully sell is technology and products as third party supplier.

Their only announcements are how they are expanding business and investing in the future, but rarely any news of valuable partnerships, dominating the market and exceeding at certain field.

I am very supportive of this company, but there is less and less good news, and more and more optimistic promises being made.

> rarely any news of valuable partnerships, dominating the market and exceeding at certain field.

The partnership with Porsche/Bugatti is quite valuable. They also dominate/exceed in terms of car performance, if not sales.

You're making it sound like they're just another Nikola with a lot of investment and only empty promises. In reality they have real products and real manufacturing, impressive results, and giant partnerships.

Looked really hard, on their website. They have a really nicely designed website and it was really difficult to find out how to buy a thing from them. That has all the hallmarks of vapor hardware. It looks like they have actually made one of their cars, and that other people have driven it.

That's a long way off from any kind of regular manufacturing for EVs

I mean, there is no buy button on Ferraris website either. They are a s supercar manufacturer.

Yup, but I've seen a Ferrari. I've never even heard of this company before this article.

They are part of a larger company has a more well known brand, Bugatti. This is the electric half of the company but it’s still focused on ultra wealthy customers.

Porsche/Bugatti ‘partnership’ was actually a large investment venture and major restructuring of the company into multiple subsidaries with a complex ownership and hierarchy. I’ll be convinced it’s valuable when something of value comes out of that venture.

On the contrary, I am not bringing their internal mindset and intentions into question at all, as I do posses some non-public details on how the company operates internally. Afterall, I mentioned in a few places, I sincerely root for that company.

However, relying on a fastest EV badge for 10 years and making some sales is not nearly enough for company of that size to take on another hit and wait project. And public data they release year after year consisting of promises and plans, but ‘keeping’ success stories, achievements and breakthroughts for themselves is enough to know it’s not a good sign.

Investors will wait for their ROI only for so long.

I'm a bit sceptical about this. This guy was taking goverment and EU money promising self driving taxies fleet, he was supposed to deliver 2 years ago. China already has them cruising their street, Tesla also had some great success with self driving, yet from Rimac there is nothing, no progress, nothing to show.

He promised them for 2024, not 2 years ago.

Yeah I think chasing self-driving tech is a red herring for the company.

They're not so big that they can afford to pour a lot of money into it (and we've seen from Google, Uber and Tesla how slow the progress there is if you want a tech that works reliably in real life).

I hope they double down on what they're great at, and this announcement is a step in right direction (IMHO as an armchair analyst, I'm not in the industry).

Tesla is promising self driving cars for years. Even to promised Coast-to-Coast drive we are still waiting for.

I see your point about Tesla overpromising, however at least tesla has put into production some level of autonomy, these guys sell vehicles without any kind of driver assistance. At the same time there wasn't any kind of show by Rimac of the autonomous driving tech thats capable of at least holding the car in the same lane on a semi straight road. I think Tesla and others are miles away from where Rimac is today.

>Even to promised Coast-to-Coast drive we are still waiting for.

Hasn't it be done already, with FSD (already accessible to hundreds of thousands of Tesla owners) and zero intervention?

IIRC, Tesla or Elon said the coast-to-coast thing is not a goal for the company anymore because they prefer to work the actual needs of the Tesla drivers, who bought and use the product already but don't do coast-to-coast. But FSD can definitely achieve this today (single stack for city and highway since v11.3), it's just a matter of reaching zero intervention (once or repeatedly).

There are so many zero-takeover drives published daily nowadays: https://www.youtube.com/@WholeMars/videos (some are 7h+ long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgAwKf9HCHU)

I mean, I think this makes the point in the original comment even more clear. It's easy to promise things. Be suspicious of any claims without physical evidence of the actual end result. That goes for Tesla, and any other company promising energy storage.

Slightly off-topic:

When talking about this in meat-space, the correct pronunciation of "Rimac" is "Reemats", and not "Rimmack", like Jeremy Clarkson always pronounces it on TV, which always annoys me to no end.

That is closer, but it's also not exactly correct. Now that I think about it, I don't think the English language has any sound where the letter "c" is used as it's pronounced in Croatian language. For example, the word "points" has the "ts" sound which is phonetically closest to the letter "c", but the the letter "c" is much sharper and shorter.

Edit: just as I wrote that, a word popped into my head which has almost the same "c" sound: Pizza. The "zz" sound, if you can call it that, is closer to the "c" letter phonetically than "ts". So Rimac would be pronounced something like Reemazz.

iirc Mate mentioned in an interview that they don't get offended about the "English" pronunciation.

As any other automaker on the international market... being it Porsche, Volkswagen, Mazda, etc..

Unless they add pronunciation to every article, I don't think that will change. It looks like an English word and will be mentioned in many English contexts. Why/how would anyone choose the alternative?

In that specific context though Clarkson is supposed to be a journalist, the slightest bit of research would have gone a long way.

We will worry about pronunciation when the ship actual product, ok?

You can't buy Rimac cars already? Well I know most can't afford a Rimac, but that's a different story...

Specifically what annoys me about that is Clarkson is supposed to be a journalist, the slightest bit of research would have gone a long way.

From the press release:

> Rimac Technology launches Rimac Energy [...] to create the next generation of stationary Energy Storage Systems (ESS). [...] Rimac Energy will produce its pilot systems for selected customers this year with commissioning in 2024. High volume ESS production shall begin in 2025 at the Rimac Campus in Croatia, scaling to more than 10GWh of annual production.

Good to see that Croatia gets some decent future-proof industry.

I highly admire Mate Rimac. He could be just another refugee kid in Germany. And now he’s pushing tech industry in his home country to the next level.

Is Croatia in some kind of war I'm unaware of?

There was something: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_War_of_Independence

Not clear what kind of technology this is using to store energy.

Yeah - it's weird they don't say it.

Assuming it's batteries though, since the company makes battery electric cars.

They're going the same route as Tesla. Batteries. To quote:

> Initially, Rimac Energy will provide solutions for large commercial, industrial, and utility-scale applications, with battery-buffered solutions for fast and mega-watt charging already underway. The company currently has several customer projects in discussion, including a pilot with a leading renewable energy company to provide battery storage solutions for their solar and wind power plants.

fast is a noun, got it

So, they have essentialy created and announced a brand that will go down that route. How viable is having mass production of a product in less than two years with pilot projects underway all while core business and other high profile technological advancements are still being in development?

Don't get me wrong, they are a huge startup with the right mindset and expertise, but they didn't excel at one single thing other than investment collecting, and yet another high profile project is set to flourish in two years...

They excelled at building an ev supercar and components for porsche, ferrari and others

they remind me so much of the Theranos.

I was half hoping that it was a kinetic storage solution, like the brick-based one that did the rounds a week or so ago.

Hard to extract TL;DR: It's a battery for power plants. None built yet but in "talks" with potential customers.

Perhaps I should clarify. This product announcement is about a battery that attaches to a commercial power plant, like a company or utility would run. It's not about car batteries, although the company currently makes those. There are no users for the power plant product yet.

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