Bugatti is the jewel in Volkswagen’s crown. This 33-year-old is taking it over

The man now taking the wheel at Bugatti is Mate Rimac, a 33-year-old Bosnian-born engineering prodigy — and one who harbors no illusions about the challenges facing his industry. Famous today for some of the world’s biggest and powerful gasoline engines ever put into a road car, Bugatti had been reborn in 2003 as the jewel in the crown of the Volkswagen Group. Besides VW, the global automaker’s other brands include Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini and Bentley. Ever since, Bugatti has been a technological showcase for the company, pushing the limits of what engineers and customers thought possible. A car that could top 250 miles per hour? No problem. One that can do 300? Sure, as long as you’ve got the nearly $4 million it costs. And all that performance comes wrapped in an elegantly designed, carefully handcrafted body custom-made from expensive materials.But enormous engines fueled by petroleum products are no longer technological wonders. They’re old school. And in 2021, Bugatti needs to finally enter the age of electric vehicles.In apparent contradiction to his stated pessimism about the future of cars, Rimac says he expects Bugatti, founded 112 years ago, to long outlive him. He now has “the responsibility [of] the next 112 years,” he said.What that next century and then some might bring could be decided not just by Bugatti-Rimac, but by Rimac’s other company, Rimac Technology.”I love cars, I make money by selling cars, but I think the big change that will come in the next decades,” he said. “In the last decades, the phones didn’t just change the phone industry. Apple didn’t just disrupt Nokia and the others. It actually changed our lives.”Rimac isn’t ready to say just yet what that future will look like, one shaped by some radical redefinition of the automobile. But he’s working on it.