The boss of Bugatti and Rimac isn’t your typical car nut. He built a hypercar empire from his dad’s garage, runs the greatest name in the automotive universe, and had 1,000% confidence in his conationals. So much so, that he didn’t even bother to lock his cars – or even take the keys with him. Until someone made off with his Chiron Sport.
Mate Rimac is probably the coolest car guy on the planet, bar none. He sits at the helm of not one, but two of the most formidable hypercar companies on Planet Speed – Bugatti and Rimac, in alphabetical order – and he rubs elbows with the likes of Christian von Koenigsegg, John Hennessey, Gordon Murray, as well as other, more obscure names in the business, like Porsche or BMW.
And he just had his car stolen. Remember that Batman movie line (with Val Kilmer playing Bruce Wayne): “He took the car!” “What car?” “The OTHER car!” Alfred was telling Batman that Robin had basically nicked the Batmobile. Well, Mate went through a very similar experience, with someone taking his Bugatti and crossing the border. You might want to crab popcorn for this one.
Better yet, pull up a barstool and order a cold pint, because the greatest automotive pub story of 2026 just dropped on Instagram courtesy of the man himself. A casual and regular reporter of his own adventures, Mate Rimac told it himself on Instagram.
Photo: YouTube/Automotive Mike
Imagine being the 38-year-old chief executive of Bugatti Rimac and having your own personal hypercar nicked in broad daylight. From your own back yard. Literally. It sounds like the rejected script of a slapstick heist movie, yet on Wednesday, October 28, reality outshined fiction right outside of Zagreb, Croatia.
The machine at the center of this Balkan escapade is not a battered commuter hatchback, but Rimac’s personal Bugatti Chiron Sport, affectionately known by its Zagreb vanity plate moniker, CRO-BUG. Finished in dark blue exposed carbon fiber with a bold red number 16 on the horseshoe grille and Croatian tricolor flags under the wing mirrors, this 1-of-500 Molsheim masterpiece carried a casual market value of 3,000,000 euros, or $3,300,000.
The past tense is mandatory, because: A) the car is worth a lot more now, being Mate’s own ride, and B) it’s the only stolen Bugatti Chiron in the world that got recovered in less than 24 hours, and had the owner chase down the thief, accompanied by a multi-national police escort. (At this point, you’re wondering what car did Mate use to hunt a Chiron. Ironically, he actually does have something that will catch a Bugatti – the Rimac Nevera, remember? – but he went old-school. Read on).
Photo: YouTube/Automotive Mike
Beneath that sculpted carbon skin sits an 8.0-liter quad-turbocharged W16 engine cranking out 1,500 PS, or 1,479 hp, and 1,600 Nm, or 1,180 lb-ft of torque. Tipping the scales at 1,978 kg, or 4,361 lbs, which is 18 kg, or 40 lbs, lighter than the standard model, the all-wheel-drive missile rockets from 0 to 100 kph, or 62 mph, in 2.4 seconds toward a 420-kph, or 261-mph, top speed.
Naturally, when you own a 1,500-PS hypercar that reaches 200 kph, or 124 mph, in 6.1 seconds and 300 kph, or 186 mph, in 13.1 seconds, you guard the keys with armed mercenaries, right? Not if you are Mate Rimac. For years, the company boss has casually left the keys sitting inside his Chiron and his Rimac Nevera, treating multi-million-euro engineering marvels like old farm tractors in a barn. Pardon the mistake. Like tractors outside the barn.
In his hilarious 6-minute Instagram confession, Rimac explained that he was simply proud of how safe Croatia is (he’s right to be proud, it’s a great country. Ask Elon Musk more details. Serbians, stay put). Furthermore, the sprawling Rimac Campus in Sveta Nedelja was deliberately designed without perimeter fences so visitors can walk right up to the buildings.
Photo: YouTube/Automotive Mike
Because engineers and friends constantly borrow and test his cars while he sits in meetings, leaving the key fob inside saved everyone the daily hassle of chasing him around. And if someone with a bit of common sense will raise the question “Why can’t the keys stay in a basket in the lobby?”, good for you. Efficiency. Why waste time going to the keys and then to the car, when you can go straight to the car, and find the keys inside?
That utopian trust worked flawlessly until Wednesday afternoon, when a 36-year-old Croatian man strolled onto the unfenced campus looking for employment. That’s what Mate said the thief told him, once the whole adventure was over. Instead of dropping off a resume at the reception desk like a normal applicant, our ambitious protagonist spotted the 3,000,000-euro Bugatti parked outside with the key practically winking at him from the leather interior.
Skipping the interview entirely, he promoted himself to test pilot and rumbled right away. At this point, I have to give full credit to the man for two things: having the decency to put out his cigarette before climbing into 3.3 million bucks, and not damaging the driver seat with the enormous set of brass he was carrying. Mate posted a footage of the security cams – see it below. If this isn’t going to be a chapter in GTA 6, they’d better not release it at all.
Photo: YouTube/Automotive Mike
The funniest part of this Grand Theft Auto audition is that nobody at the factory would have noticed the car was missing for hours. Rimac admitted that so many colleagues drive his Chiron all the time that he rarely knows where it is on any given day. Only when a sharp-eyed bystander remarked that an unfamiliar bloke was piloting the blue beast did employees fire up a frantic internal group chat.
Once every executive and engineer confirmed they had not taken the W16 out for a coffee run, the comedy of errors turned into an international manhunt. If you are going to boost a car in 2026, stealing one from the man who engineers the world’s most advanced vehicle telemetry systems is monumentally daft. A modern Bugatti is essentially a 3,000,000-euro rolling satellite that snitches on its own driver every second.
Rimac and his engineers pulled up the server logs, watching live data for speed, coordinates, and fuel levels as the thief bolted toward Slovenia with an hour head start. Refusing to sit around eating popcorn while police filed paperwork, Rimac jumped into his personal Porsche 911, which conveniently had a full tank of gas, floored the throttle, and launched a private high-speed pursuit across Central Europe after his own hypercar.
Photo: YouTube/Automotive Mike
Anyone who knows an 8.0-liter quad-turbocharged W16 knows its mortal enemy is not a spike strip, but fuel economy. A 100-liter, or 26-gallon, fuel tank isn’t good for much if the sixteen-piston behemoth sips gas like it’s free. Watching the fuel gauge plummet on the live telemetry feed, Rimac hoped the joyride would fizzle out at a Slovenian pump. Instead, our enterprising bandit pulled into a station, squeezed in half a tank of fuel, allegedly drove off without paying, and blasted across the border. Into Austria.
(That’s the one European country nobody should ever mess with. It’s happened in the past – twice. We all know how that ended).
Picture the sheer absurdity: a Croatian would-be job seeker fleeing toward Germany in a stolen three-million-euro hypercar running on half a tank of pilfered unleaded. By then, Croatian, Slovenian, and Austrian police forces had joined the chase, with one Austrian officer added directly into the Rimac team’s group chat for live GPS drops. Shortly after 7:00 PM, Styrian motorway police boxed the Chiron in at a Seiersberg gas station.
Photo: YouTube/Automotive Mike
When Rimac finally rolled up to the scene near Graz along the A9 Pyhrn motorway, he naively figured he would flash his driver’s license, shake a few hands, and drive his Bugatti home. Instead, he walked into a cinematic blockade featuring 10 police cruisers and an international task force of hot pursuit officers. Austrian bureaucracy does not care if your name is literally on the company building; the car was winched onto a flatbed truck. (I told you about them).
Here is where a hilarious pub yarn transforms into a deeply humane story. While stuck at the Styrian police station until the early morning hours proving ownership, Rimac asked to meet the culprit. Discovering a distressed 36-year-old struggling with a troubled past, Rimac felt genuine empathy rather than rage. He had even hoped to drive the bloke back home to his family, and he refused to press private charges.
(I have one question, though: Mate runs Bugatti. Exactly what proof of ownership were the police demanding from him, other than just the regular papers?)
Photo: YouTube/Automotive Mike
Of course, cross-border grand theft auto of a 3,000,000-euro asset triggers automatic prosecution in both Austria and Croatia, though prosecutors released the perpetrator to defend himself at liberty. The Chiron suffered minor cosmetic damage that Molsheim’s artisans will easily buff out, and everyone walked away unharmed.
Rimac still refuses to build fences around his campus, though he finally promised to keep the keys in his pocket from now on. Or, in any case, to not leave them in the car. I wonder if that job hunt still stands, and if the culprit would get a second chance at that interview.
