Mate Rimac has confirmed his own Bugatti Chiron Sport was stolen from the Rimac campus near Zagreb, kicking off a cross-border chase that ended with Austrian police catching the alleged thief. The car is worth an estimated €3 million, or about A$4.75 million, and the man who took it had reportedly walked onto the campus looking for a job.
Rimac, who runs Bugatti and founded electric hypercar maker Rimac, explained the whole saga in a clip on his Instagram, as reported by CarExpert. The most remarkable detail is how easy it was, because Rimac admitted he always leaves the keys in his cars, the Chiron and Nevera included, purely because Croatia feels that safe.
The campus has no fences, according to Rimac, and so many friends and colleagues borrow the Chiron that nobody noticed it was missing. The alarm was only raised when someone spotted an unfamiliar driver behind the wheel.
From there it played out like a heist film run by engineers. Staff piled into a group chat, called the police and pulled up the car’s telemetry, which showed its speed, fuel level and location as it headed for Slovenia.
Rimac then did what any car-mad CEO would do, jumping into his Porsche 911 with a full tank and giving chase to a man with a one-hour head start. He had hoped police would stop the Chiron before the next border, but the thief made it through Slovenia and into Austria.
The best chance came at a petrol station, where the thief allegedly put only part of a tank into the W16 and left without paying. Austrian police eventually caught him, with one officer joining the group chat to follow the car’s location in real time, and Rimac said the man was Croatian and told authorities he’d been heading for Germany.
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Rimac met the man after he was caught and said he didn’t want charges laid, although the alleged thief still faces action from both Austrian and Croatian authorities. The Chiron picked up some damage along the way, which Rimac waved off with a classic “It’s okay, I don’t care, we will repair it.”
Stealing a Chiron is an ambitious first day on the job. The Sport runs an 8.0-litre quad-turbocharged W16 making 1103kW and 1600Nm, hits 100km/h in 2.4 seconds and is electronically limited to 420km/h, and with the last W16 now built, there won’t be any more of them.
Austrian police also have some form with Chirons. In March 2025, officers in Vienna seized one on the spot after its driver was caught doing 123km/h in a 50km/h zone, and the driver’s excuse that it belonged to a friend got him nowhere.
Rimac’s takeaway is simple. He says the keys won’t be left lying around the factory any more, and he warned anyone thinking of trying their luck not to bother.
It’s still a better Bugatti story than most, though it has competition from the day Erling Haaland rode shotgun in Monaco’s most famous Bugatti.
