A job seeker drove off in Mate Rimac’s Bugatti Chiron, and Rimac chased it in his Porsche 911

A man in his mid-30s walked onto the Rimac Campus in Croatia looking for a job this week and left behind the wheel of Mate Rimac’s own Bugatti Chiron. Rimac, whom Carscoops describes as Bugatti’s boss, jumped into his Porsche 911 and chased the hypercar toward Slovenia without ever catching it. Austrian police eventually found the car and arrested the driver.

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A hypercar parked with the key inside on an open campus

The Chiron in question is Rimac’s personal car, a dark blue example that he had parked earlier in the week at the Rimac Campus with the key left in it. As Carscoops relays Rimac’s account, the habit is deliberate: engineers at the campus drive and test the car all the time, so leaving the key inside is easier than handing it back and forth. The campus is also open to the public, which meant a stranger could walk up to the car without passing a gate or a guard.

Security footage described in the Carscoops report shows the man at the back of the campus. He smoked a cigarette, opened the driver’s door of the Bugatti Chiron, got in and drove away. The Chiron is an 8.0-liter quad-turbocharged W16 hypercar that Bugatti built from 2016 as the successor to the Veyron, in a run limited to 500 cars, so the model is far from an anonymous target. Mate Rimac told the story himself in two Instagram posts, and the second of them, also embedded by Carscoops, is the closest thing to a first-hand record of the theft that has been published.

Tracking data, a Porsche 911 and a chase across two borders

Rimac’s team noticed the car was missing and called local police. Tracking data from the Chiron showed its live location heading toward Slovenia, which let the owner follow the car even though the thief already had a head start. Rimac got into his Porsche 911 and pursued it, but he could not catch the driver in Slovenia or after the car crossed into Austria. A 911 is a quick road car, yet the Chiron is rated at about 1,500 metric horsepower, and no pursuer in a road car closes a gap like that on an open highway.

Austrian police located the car and arrested the man. Rimac then went to the police station to prove he owned the Chiron, and on the way he spoke with the suspect.

By Rimac’s account, as Carscoops reports it, the man said he had walked into the campus looking for work, noticed a Chiron with its key inside and hoped to drive it to Germany. Why Germany is unclear, and Carscoops says as much. The suspect has not been named in any report available, and describing him as a job seeker rests on his own statement as relayed by Rimac, not on a police finding or a court record.

A scuffed splitter, pending charges and the key-in-the-car habit

The Chiron survived the theft with only a scuffed carbon-fiber front splitter, which Bugatti will need to repair. For a car of this kind, a cosmetic carbon part is a modest bill compared with what a crash at speed through two countries could have produced. Croatian and Austrian police are expected to file charges and prosecute, according to Carscoops, although neither force’s statement was available and the report does not say what the charges will be.

Rimac’s own takeaway, in the words Carscoops relays, is that even in a safe country such as Croatia it is never a good idea to leave a car unlocked with the keys inside. That lesson comes from a man who founded Rimac Automobili in 2009 and now leads a company that makes some of the fastest road cars in the world. The detail that matters for owners of ordinary cars is how little the theft required: no tools, no hacking, one open door and a key that was exactly where a thief would hope to find it.

The setting adds to the oddity. The Rimac Campus near Zagreb houses engineering and production work for the Croatian company’s electric hypercars and is also tied to Bugatti’s operations, since Rimac took over the French marque’s management in 2021 in a venture with Porsche. The thief’s stated reason for being there, a job inquiry, fits that openness, though Carscoops does not say whether any staff member spoke to him before he reached the driver’s seat.

Open questions remain about the legal side. The car was taken in Croatia and recovered in Austria after passing through Slovenia, so prosecutors in more than one country could claim the case, and no police or prosecutor statement has been published to say which one will lead. Until one appears, the full account of the theft rests on Rimac’s two Instagram posts as summarized by Carscoops.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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