Robb Interview: Mate Rimac, CEO Bugatti Rimac
The Croatian entrepreneur and Rimac founder is driving the historic French marque – and wider auto industry – into the future.
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Mate Rimac sat at a table, facing a camera. To his right was Oliver Blume, the CEO of Porsche, and to his left its finance chief, Lutz Meschke. They were about to host a video conference to announce the deal to merge Bugatti, for which Porsche has responsibility within the vast Volkswagen Group, with Rimac’s eponymous start-up hypercar maker. A small number of journalists from the business media joined Robb Report on the call, among them the Financial Times and Bloomberg. Blume and Meschke were dressed in sober business attire, as you’d expect of German C-suite executives making a major announcement to the world’s press, and they sat stiff and upright. But as the 33-year-old Rimac relaxed into his chair, his sneakers emerged from beneath the table, followed by a pair of bare legs. The wunderkind of the hypercar world was about to be handed control of one of its most fabled marques, and he’d chosen to wear shorts for the occasion.
Rimac doubtless meant no disrespect, but his casual dress served as useful visual shorthand for a transfer of power extraordinary even by the turbulent standards of the supercar industry. Stewardship of arguably the world’s most prestigious marque, founded 112 years ago by one of the great automotive auteurs and maker of some of the most beautiful, powerful cars ever to grace the road, was passing from Europe’s largest manufacturing company to a start-up that began in a tiny nation 12 years ago by someone then barely out of his teens. Later that evening there would be a glossy event livestreamed from the spectacular 14th-century Lovrijenac fortress perched high over beautiful, ancient Dubrovnik and the opal waters of Croatia’s Adriatic coast. Rimac (his name is pronounced MAH-tay REE-mats) leapt on stage to acknowledge the significance of what was happening and the responsibility he was assuming. He was now wearing a well-cut suit but still kept the sneakers.
From left: A Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo, a Rimac Nevera and a Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport, a fitting troika. Rimac Automobili
Despite his youth, Rimac is already acknowledged by his peers as one of the preeminent modern supercar makers, a successor to Ettore Bugatti alongside Horacio Pagani, Christian von Koenigsegg and Gordon Murray. The club of engineers who have created the cars and companies that carry their names from scratch is exclusive, and Rimac had only officially joined it when the Bugatti deal was announced in early July. The Rimac Nevera, his first proper production electric hypercar, was tested by Robb Report and a handful of other media in June, and customer deliveries are just starting.
But Rimac is already an established player. While developing his own hypercar, he has built a multibillion-dollar business supplying his high-performance electric-propulsion technology to at least 15 major carmakers, including Ferrari, Aston Martin, Mercedes and Rimac’s fellow auteur Christian von Koenigsegg. Porsche and Hyundai are not only customers but also investors with significant equity stakes, and Pininfarina likes the Nevera so much that it’s using the car as the basis of its new 1400kW Battista. His business has grown so fast that Rimac simply hasn’t had time to get his own hypercar on sale until now.
The optics of the Bugatti-Rimac merger may seem odd at first, but the logic is indisputable. A new generation of electric Bugattis needs a transcendent level of performance, but Volkswagen has lost the will to fund it. Big car companies can spend like the US military. Analysts estimate that VW has invested at least approx. $3.2 billion in Bugatti since it took control in 1998 and lost around $6.86 million on every Veyron sold. It spent about $575 million creating the Chiron from the bones of the Veyron, and sources close to the deal say VW expected to spend the same again electrifying this 16-year-old platform.
Rimac is said to have offered to develop an all-new Chiron successor for around $330 million. Rather than write a check for that sum, VW proposed a merger. No cash is believed to have changed hands. The new Bugatti-Rimac will be 55 per cent owned by the Rimac Group and 45 per cent by Porsche, on behalf of Volkswagen. For now, the two brands will continue to be designed and built separately: Bugattis in Molsheim, France, and Rimacs from 2023 at its new campus headquarters near Zagreb.
The Rimac campus, set to be completed in 2023 outside the Croatian capital of Zagreb, will be the company’s global headquarters. Rimac Automobili
Rimac is putting only his hypercar-making business into the new joint venture. His fast-growing operation supplying high-performance EV power trains and other equipment to the global carmakers is a separate business: Rimac Technology, solely owned by Rimac Group. Only 150 Neveras will be made, and Bugatti currently builds fewer than 100 cars each year. Even when the combined Bugatti-Rimac is at full production, the venture will account for only 15 to 20 per cent of Rimac Group turnover. Rimac Technology will make up the rest, and it’s about to grow rapidly. It has contracts in place to supply major premium carmakers with components and complete power trains for the high-performance variants of their pure-electric models. With volumes of up to 100,000 each year, it’s a huge leap in scale for Rimac. Your next car might not be a Nevera, but there’s a chance it will have Rimac tech on board.
Rimac remains the largest shareholder in the Rimac Group, with a 37 per cent stake. The latest funding round is believed to value the group in the mid-single-digit billions, giving him a nominal net worth of around $2.7 billion. In addition to Porsche AG’s 45 per cent stake in Bugatti-Rimac, Porsche’s venture-capital arm owns 24 per cent of Rimac Group, giving Porsche indirect majority ownership of Bugatti-Rimac. But Porsche is clear that there is no combination of voting rights, no de facto or de jure control, and that having Rimac as CEO of all three companies is one of the reasons it wanted the deal. “As a shareholder we want a real entrepreneur as CEO,” Blume says. “It is our clear strategy to pass operational control to Mate.”
The new Rimac Nevera assembly line in Croatia, where Rimac Group is based. Rimac Automobili
Perhaps most strikingly, the deal means that despite that storied history, a 10-figure investment by VW over 23 years of ownership and hundreds of Veyrons and Chirons delivered, Bugatti is valued at less than Rimac’s Nevera-making operation alone, which is only just beginning to deliver customer cars. The reason is simple: Bugatti is almost worthless without the ultrahigh-performance electric power train it will need in the EV age.
Volkswagen doesn’t want to make the investment required to develop one. Rimac has one already. Without it, VW was seriously considering putting the Bugatti brand into cold storage.
Even by the hyper-compressed standards of the young entrepreneurs remaking the modern world, this has been a wild few months for Mate Rimac. First the launch of the Nevera in June, then the Bugatti announcement in early July and, later that same month, marriage to his childhood sweetheart. Then a tour of the US, starting in Los Angeles and Pebble Beach in August, to meet not only customers for his approx. $3.29 million Nevera but also Bugatti’s established clientele, who might be a little wary of both the brand’s transition to electric propulsion and its youthful new boss. Next he headed back to Zagreb to complete the transfer of power from Bugatti’s current CEO, the urbane Stephan Winkelmann, who also heads Lamborghini. Then he’ll continue the process of creating a successor for the Chiron.
“This year, just as you say, it’s like everything is coming together. It’s just f—— insane for me,” he tells me from New York. I’ve spoken with him several times over the past, mad few months: first spending a relaxed couple of days with him on the bleak but beautiful Croatian island of Pag, where he launched the Nevera, and later on that conference call. He looks tired now, after his fierce travel schedule. But he is typically generous with his time, disarmingly honest, asking questions as well as answering them, and generally personable, approachable, funny and human: atypical, perhaps, for a tech entrepreneur.
Every cent of that $2.7 billion net worth is self-made. Rimac was born in Bosnia to an ethnically Croatian family of migrant construction workers, a tradition of exodus accelerated by the vicious conflict that raged as Yugoslavia disintegrated. Rimac moved to Germany at age 2 and then to an independent Croatia in his early teens, where he was teased for his hick Bosnian accent. But his talent for electronic engineering was spotted and encouraged by a teacher, and by age 18 he had registered a couple of patents and won a national prize for an early example of wearable tech: a “glove” that recognized hand gestures and could be used instead of a mouse. It’s still on display in a cabinet at Rimac’s HQ.
Rimac liked cars as much as gadgets and bought a battered BMW 3 Series, as it was the cheapest way to get a rear-wheel-drive car that he could race and drift. His best friend, Goran, inadvertently gave a multibillion-dollar business its start when he blew the BMW’s engine, prompting its 20-year-old owner to combine his two passions and replace the gas engine with an electric motor. It worked okay but not well enough for Rimac, who pulled it out again and tinkered with it, beginning a constant process of obsessive iterative improvement over 13 years, which he admits drives him and his staff crazy but has now resulted in his owning the best high-performance EV propulsion tech in the world. And most of Bugatti.
I ask him to define what makes Rimac stand apart—what has brought so many established carmakers to Croatia in search of a way to make a fast EV quickly?
“Look at the Nevera,” he says. “Almost everything in it was developed internally. This is what makes us different. There is no other car company that has developed so many things in a car by themselves. And the second thing is execution. There are many other start-ups working on their cars. Many of them have existed longer than us, and all of them have more funding than us. But we are the first after Tesla who finished the car and started production. Execution is everything.
“And we do it for a fraction of the cost of others. It’s not because Croatian salaries are lower. It’s because we do things very differently from the other carmakers. And lastly, of course, it’s performance. There’s nobody even close to us.”
The Rimac Nevera monocoque, the biggest and stiffest single piece of carbon fibre in the automotive industry. Rimac Automobili
This is demonstrably true. In August a Nevera was independently tested at the Famoso dragstrip in California. The Bugatti Chiron Sport held the previous world production-car acceleration record, covering the quarter-mile in 9.4 seconds. The 1427kW Nevera ate up Famoso’s sticky tarmac in just 8.582 seconds at a terminal velocity of 268km/h. That 0.8 second difference is a lifetime in these matters: Now combustion engines will never catch up. The Tesla Model S Plaid faced off against the Nevera in three races a few days later and, though it also beat the Chiron’s time, as promised, with a top time of 9.272 seconds, it was a long way behind the Nevera.
The Nevera’s stellar price automatically puts it in the beyond-premium segment of the car market, and while it’s surprisingly comfortable and practical for something with such terrifying performance, it was never intended to be a luxury good. Bugatti is different, though, and this young, egalitarian, unpretentious electronic engineer is now in control of one of the world’s great luxury brands. The glamour of running a marque like Bugatti and delivering a luxury customer experience doesn’t seem to drive him; the question of whether he has plans to reinvent super-premium motoring as comprehensively as he has reinvented electric performance cars remains.
“For me, it’s more about cars and ecology,” he says. “For the Nevera, luxury was not really a concern: It’s more about tech and performance. Luxury is much more important to Bugatti. That’s why I think the two brands can coexist. Over the last 20 years, no other car had Bugatti’s performance. That’s what made them special. Then came craftsmanship, quality and details, but number one was performance. But now performance is increasingly commoditized. You have a five-seat sedan like the Model S being faster-accelerating than pretty much anything else on the road. So what puts you at the top of the pyramid in the future? Is it really just performance?
“Of course we’ll still do hypercars for Bugatti. We are working on a Chiron successor. But looking at Bugattis of the past, there haven’t been only sports cars. When performance alone is no longer the top selling point, what puts you at the pinnacle? Is it still a two-seat, rear-engine hypercar? Or might there be something else? There’s an opportunity for Bugatti in the future to have very interesting cars that are completely different to other models on the market, while Rimac remains a maker of very high-performance sports cars. But we haven’t figured that out ourselves yet.”
The details haven’t been officially confirmed, but there will be two all-new Bugattis engineered by Rimac before 2030. The first will be a 1491kW, two-seat hybrid hypercar, due around 2025. The Chiron’s 8.0-litre W-16 engine shorn of its four turbos will make half of that power and a Rimac electric-drive system the rest. Next comes a pure EV by 2030. From his hints, we may reasonably expect a four-door grand coupe to differentiate it from future Rimacs and to continue where Bugatti’s fabulous but ill-fated Royale of the 1930s left off.
Rimac will be involved in every aspect of their design. While his fellow Croat Adriano Mudri heads the company’s design department and Rimac’s specific expertise is in electric power trains, he obsesses over every aspect of his car’s design in the broadest sense.
The hypercar’s 4-motor drivetrain and 120 kwh battery pack. Rimac Automobili
“With a car, everything is important,” he says. “I define every little detail. The company is still very dependent on me for that, but I don’t think that’s good. I think that’s a personal failure.”
It’s clearly the cars, their design and engineering, and the environment that enthuse him. And given the tiny volumes in which his own cars will be made, his attention may begin to turn to some unexpected new projects where the ecological benefit is greater.
“I love hypercars. I love doing this stuff,” he says. “But in reality, it has a low impact on society. Electrification is an important step, but on its own it’s not going to save the world. I believe there are much bigger levers. In automotive terms, the big impact comes from new mobility, and we want to be a significant part of it. It doesn’t mean that we will stop doing what we are doing now, but for the last few years we’ve been working on a robot taxi service and the whole ecosystem around it. I don’t want to say too much about it. I’d rather do it and then show it. But you’ll see it early next year.”
His fellow supercar auteurs may be glad to see Rimac’s intellect and energy distracted by more pedestrian projects, though at this level there’s little conventional rivalry: Many of their customers can simply buy every model that interests them, and the marques are as likely to collaborate as compete. “It has been amazing to follow and support Mate’s rise,” says Christian von Koenigsegg, whose Regera uses Rimac’s batteries. “He has stayed true to his calling since a young age. For sure it was a big bet for us to trust such a young company and founder as a supplier. Neither Mate nor myself are traditional engineers, as we don’t have academic engineering backgrounds, but are more self-taught. I even think this might be a prerequisite for what we do as we are less limited in our thinking, and by working together we showed the big boys there is a new era coming.
“Bugatti always prided itself on being a part of a large group,” he continues. “We at Koenigsegg have always taken pride in standing on our own two feet. Now Bugatti has been taken over by a similar company with a similar philosophy to us, so now the extreme-sports car producers are more stand-alone than before. That’s a big shift. It’s interesting how the world changes.”
The world might be moving Rimac’s way, but there’s still risk. Those big contracts and the Bugatti deal make funding easy now, but he has to scale up fast, delivering power trains in far higher volumes than before and to perfect, German premium-marque quality levels from job one. By his own admission, he also has to make the business less dependent on him and maintain the energy and agility of a start-up while acquiring the scope of a proper, grown-up business. As even Elon Musk can attest, that’s not easy.
From New York, Rimac tells me that he has been looking at the stock tickers in Times Square and thinking again about an IPO. He doesn’t want to do it until he is shipping Neveras, fulfilling those new bigger contracts, has built his $240 million campus headquarters near Zagreb for the 2,500 employees he will have by 2023 and has revenues in the approx. $822 million range, which will happen rather earlier.
He wonders if he made a mistake in not going public sooner. “This is my first job, you know?” he says. “I don’t know how many things I’m doing good, or how many things I’m doing very badly. I guess there must be both.” Given Rimac’s current valuation of around $8.23 billion, and potentially much more if the robotaxi bet comes in, his investors and the major carmakers seem to think he’s doing okay. Maybe he’ll wear shorts when he finally rings the Nasdaq opening bell.
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The starters are on the blocks, and with less than 100 days to go until the Paris 2024 Olympics, luxury Swiss watchmaker Omega was bound to release something spectacular to mark its bragging rights as the official timekeeper for the Summer Games. Enter the new 43mm Speedmaster Chronoscope, available in new colourways—gold, black, and white—in line with the colour theme of the Olympic Games in Paris this July.
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This time, he presents a historically important landscape series that chronicles a time in New York City that no longer exists. It’s a nostalgic trip back in time, a nocturnal odyssey through the frenetic, neon-lit streets of a long-lost America.
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As a kid, I was fascinated by stories of adventurers trying to reach the North Pole without any means of rescue. In the 19th century, most of their attempts ended in disaster—ships getting trapped in the ice, a hydrogen balloon crashing, even cannibalism. It wasn’t until Cook and Peary reportedly set foot there that the race to the North Pole was really on. Norwegian Roald Amundsen, the first to reach the South Pole, in 1911, is credited with being the first to document a trip over the North Pole, which he did in 1926 in the airship Norge. In 1977, the nuclear-powered icebreaker Arktika became the first surface vessel to make it to the North Pole. Since then, only 18 other ships have completed the voyage.
Visiting the North Pole seemed about as likely for me as walking on the Moon. It wasn’t even on my bucket list. Then came Le Commandant Charcot, which was named after France’s most beloved polar explorer and reportedly cost about US$430 million (around $655 million) to build. The irony of visiting one of the planet’s most remote and inhospitable points while travelling in the lap of luxury doesn’t escape me or anyone else I speak with on the voyage. Danie Ferreira, from Cape Town, South Africa, describes it as “an ensemble of contradictions bordering on the absurd”. Ferreira, who is on board with his wife, Suzette, is a veteran of early-explorer-style high-Arctic journeys, months-long treks involving dog sleds and real toil and suffering. He booked this trip to obtain an official North Pole stamp for an upcoming two-volume collection of his photographs, Out in the Cold, documenting his polar adventures. “Reserving the cabin felt like a betrayal of my expeditionary philosophy,” he says with a laugh.
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Marchesseau, a tall, lanky, 40-ish mariner from Brittany, impeccable in his navy uniform but rocking royal-blue boat shoes, proves to be a charming host. Never short of a good quip, he’s one of three experienced ice captains who alternate at the helm of Charcot throughout the year. He began piloting Ponant ships through drifting ice floes in Antarctica in 2009, when he took the helm of Le Diamant, Ponant’s first expedition vessel. “An epic introduction,” Marchesseau calls those early voyages, but the isolated, icebound North Pole aboard a larger, more complicated vessel is potentially an even thornier challenge. “We’ll first sail east where the ice is less concentrated and then enter the pack at 81 degrees,” he tells a lecture hall filled with passengers on day one. “We don’t plan to stop until we get to the North Pole.”
Around us, the majority of the other 101 guests are older French couples; there are also a few extended families, some other Europeans, mostly German and Dutch, as well as 10 Americans. Among the supporting cast are six research scientists and 221 staff, including 18 naturalist guides from a variety of countries.
The first six days are more about the journey than the destination. Cathy and I settle into our comfortable stateroom, enjoy the ocean views from our balcony, make friends with other guests and naturalists, frequent the spa, and indulge in the contemporary French cuisine at Nuna, which is often jarred by ice passing under the hull, as well as at the more casual Sila (Inuit for “sky”). There are the usual cruise events: the officers’ gala, wine pairings, daily French pastries, Broadway-style shows, opera singers and concert pianists. Initially, I worry about “Groundhog Day” setting in, but once we hit patchy ice floes on day two, it’s clear that the polar party is on. The next day, we’re ensconced in the ice pack.
Veterans of Arctic journeys immediately feel at home. Ferreira, often found on the observation deck 15 metres above the ice with his long-lensed cameras, is in his element snapping different patterns and colours of the frozen landscape. “It feels like combining low-level flying with an out-of-body experience,” he says. “Whenever the hull shudders against the ice, I have a reality check.”
“I came back because I love this ice,” adds American Gin Millsap, who with her husband, Jim, visited the North Pole in 2015 aboard the Russian nuclear icebreaker Fifty Years of Victory, which for obvious reasons is no longer a viable option for Americans and many Europeans. “I love the peace, beauty and calmness.”
It is easy to bliss out on the endless barren vistas, constantly morphing into new shapes, contours and shades of white as the weather moves from bright sunshine to howling snowstorms—sometimes within the course of a few hours. I spend a lot of time on the cold, windswept bow, looking at the snow patterns, ridges and rivers flowing within the pale landscape as the boat crunches through the ice. It feels like being in a black-and-white movie, with no colours except the turquoise bottoms of ice blocks overturned by the boat. Beautiful, lonely, mesmerising.
Rather than a solid landmass, the Arctic ice pack is actually millions of square kilometres of ice floes, slowly pushed around by wind and currents. The size varies according to season: this past winter, the ice was at its fifth-lowest level on record, encompassing 14.6 million square kilometres, while during our cruise it was 4.7 million square kilometres, the 10th-lowest summer number on record. There are myriad ice types—young ice, pancake ice, ice cake, brash ice, fast ice—but the two that our ice pilot, Geir-Martin Leinebø, cares about are first-year ice and old ice. The thinness of the former provides the ideal route to the Pole, while the denseness of the aged variety can result in three-to-eight-metre-high ridges that are potentially impassable. Leinebø is no novice: in his day job, he’s the captain of Norway’s naval icebreaker, KV Svalbard, the first Norwegian vessel to reach the North Pole, in 2019.
It’s not a matter of just pointing the boat due north and firing up the engine. Leinebø zigzags through the floes. A morning satellite feed and special software aid in determining the best route; the ship’s helicopter sometimes scouts 65 or so kilometres ahead, and there’s a sonar called the Sea Ice Monitoring System (SIMS). But mostly Leinebø uses his eyes. “You look for the weakest parts of the ice—you avoid the ridges because that means thickness and instead look for water,” he says. “If the ‘water sky’ in the distance is dark, it’s reflecting water like a mirror, so you head in that direction.”
Everyone on the bridge is surprised by the lack of multi-year ice, but with more than a hint of disquietude. Though we don’t have to ram our way through frozen ridges, the advance of climate change couldn’t be more apparent. Environmentalists call the Arctic ice sheet the canary in the coal mine of the planet’s climate change for good reason: it is happening here first. “It’s not right,” mutters Leinebø. “There’s just too much open water for July. Really scary.”
The Arctic ice sheet has shrunk to about half its 1985 size, and as both mariners and scientists on board note, the quality of the ice is deteriorating. “It’s happening faster than our models predicted,” says Marisol Maddox, senior arctic analyst at the Polar Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “We’re seeing major events like Greenland’s ice sheet melting and sliding into the ocean—that wasn’t forecasted until 2070.” The consensus had been that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2050, but many scientists now expect that day to come in the 2030s.
That deterioration, it turns out, is why the three teams of scientists are on the voyage—two studying the ice and the other assessing climate change’s impact on plankton. As part of its commitment to sustainability, Ponant has designed two research labs—one wet and one dry—on a lower deck. “We took the advice of many scientists for equipping these labs,” says Hugues Decamus, Charcot’s chief engineer, clearly proud of the nearly US$12 million facilities.
The combined size of the labs, along with a sonar room, a dedicated server for the scientists, and a meteorological station on the vessel’s top deck, totals 130 square metres—space that could have been used for revenue generation. Ponant also has two staterooms reserved for scientists on each voyage and provides grants for travel expenses. The line doesn’t cherrypick researchers but instead asks the independent Arctic Research Icebreaker Consortium (ARICE) to choose participants based on submissions.
The idea, says the vessel’s science officer on this voyage, Daphné Buiron, is to make the process transparent and minimise the appearance of greenwashing. “Yes, this alliance may deliver a positive public image for the company, but this ship shows we do real science on board,” she says. The labs will improve over time, adds Decamus, as the ship amasses more sophisticated equipment.
Research scientists and tourist vessels don’t typically mix. The former, wary of becoming mascots for the cruise lines’ sustainability marketing efforts, and cognisant of the less-than-pristine footprint of many vessels, tend to be wary. The cruise lines, for their part, see scientists as potentially high maintenance when paying customers should be the priority. But there seemed to be a meeting of the minds, or at least a détente, on Le Commandant Charcot.
“We discuss this a lot and are aware of the downsides, but also the positives,” says Franz von Bock und Polach, head of the institute for ship structural design and analysis at Hamburg University of Technology, specialising in the physics of sea ice. Not only does Charcot grant free access to these remote areas, but the ship will also collect data on the same route multiple times a year with equipment his team leaves on board, offering what scientists prize most: repeatability. “One transit doesn’t have much value,” he says. “But when you measure different seasons, regions and years, you build up a more complex picture.” So, more than just a research paper: forecasts of ice conditions for long-term planning by governments as the Arctic transforms.
Nils Haëntjens, from the University of Maine, is analysing five-millilitre drops of water on a high-tech McLane IFCB microscope. “The instrument captures more than 250,000 images of phytoplankton along the latitudinal transect,” he says. Charcot has doors in the wet lab that allow the scientists to take water samples, and in the bow, inlets take in water without contaminating it. Two freezers can preserve samples for further research back in university labs.
Even though the boat won’t stop, the captain and chief engineer clearly want to make the science missions work. Marchesseau dispatches the helicopter with the researchers and their gear 100 kilometres ahead, where they take core samples and measurements. I spot them in their red snowsuits, pulling sleds on an ice floe, as the boat passes. Startled to see living-colour humans on the ice after days of monochrome, I feel a pang of jealousy as I head for a caviar tasting.
The only other humans we encounter on the journey north are aboard Fifty Years of Victory, the Russian icebreaker. The 160-metre orange- and-black leviathan reached the North Pole a day earlier—its 59th visit—and is on its way back to Murmansk. It’s a classic East meets West moment: the icebreaker, launched just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, meeting the new standard of polar luxury.
The evening before Bastille Day, Le Commandant Charcot arrives at the North Pole. Because of the pinpoint precision of the GPS, Marchesseau has to navigate back and forth for about 20 minutes—with a bridge full of passengers hushing each other so as not to distract him—until he finds 90 degrees north. That final chaotic approach to the top of the world in the grey, windswept landscape looks like a kid’s Etch A Sketch on the chartplotter, but it is met with rousing cheers. The next morning, with good visibility and light winds, we spill out onto the ice for the celebration, followed by a polar plunge.
As guests pose in front of flags and mile markers for major cities, the naturalist guides, armed with rifles, establish a wide perimeter to guard against polar bears. The fearless creatures are highly intelligent, with razor-sharp teeth, hooked claws and the ability to sprint at 40 km/h. Males average about three metres tall and weigh around 700 kilos. They are loners that will kill anything—including other bears and even their own cubs. Cathy and I walk around the far edges of the perimeter to enjoy some solitude. Looking out over the white landscape, I know this is a milestone. But it feels odd that getting here didn’t involve any sweat or even a modicum of discomfort.
The rest of the week is an entirely different trip. On the return south, we see a huge male polar bear ambling on the ice, looking over his shoulder at us. It is our first sighting of the Arctic’s apex predator, and everyone crowds the observation lounge with long-lensed cameras. The next day, we see another male, this one smaller, running away from the ship. “They have many personalities,” says Steiner Aksnes, head of the expedition team, who has led scientists and film crews in the Arctic for 25 years. We see a dozen on the return to Svalbard, where 3,000 are scattered across the archipelago, outnumbering human residents.
The last five days we make six stops on different islands, travelling by Zodiac from Charcot to various beaches. On Lomfjorden, as we look on a hundred yards from shore, a mother polar bear protects her two cubs while a young male hovers in the background. On a Zodiac ride off Alkefjellet, the air is alive with birds, including tens of thousands of Brünnich’s guillemots as well as glaucous gulls and kittiwakes, which nest in that island’s cliffs, while a young male polar bear munches on a ring seal, chin glistening red.
On this part of the trip, the expedition team, mostly 30-something, free-spirited scientists whose areas of expertise range from botany to alpine trekking to whales, lead hikes across different landscapes. The jam-packed schedule sometimes involves three activities per day and includes following the reindeer on Palanderbukta, seeing a colony of 200 walruses on Kapp Lee, hiking the black tundra of Burgerbukta (boasting 3.8-cm-tall willows—said to be the smallest trees in the world and the largest on Svalbard—plus mosquitoes!), watching multiple species of whales breaching offshore, and kayaking the ice floes of Ekmanfjorden. Svalbard is a protected wilderness area, and the cruise lines tailor their schedules so vessels don’t overlap, giving visitors the impression they are setting foot on virgin land.
Chances to experience that sense of discovery and wonder, even slightly stage-managed ones, are dwindling along with the ice sheet and endangered wildlife. If a stunning trip to a frozen North Pole is on your bucket list, the time to go is now.
PARADIGM SHIP
For those studying polar ice, a berth aboard Le Commandant Charcot is like a winning lottery ticket. “This cruise ship is one of the few resources scientists can use, because nothing else can get there,” says G. Mark Miller, CEO of research-vessel builder Greenwater Marine Sciences Offshore (GMSO) and a former ship captain for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “Then factor in 80 percent of scientists who want to go to sea, can’t, because of the shortage of research vessels.”
Both Ponant and Viking have designed research labs aboard new expedition vessels as part of their sustainability initiatives. “Remote areas like Antarctica need more data—the typical research is just single data points,” says Damon Stanwell-Smith, Ph.D., head of science and sustainability at Viking. “Every scientist says more information is needed.” The twin sisterships Viking Octantis and Viking Polaris, which travel to Antarctica, Patagonia, the Great Lakes and Canada, have identical 35-square-metre labs, separated into wet and dry areas and fitted out with research equipment. In hangars below are military-grade rigid-hulled inflatables and two six-person yellow submersibles (the pair on Octantis are named John and Paul, while Polaris’s are George and Ringo). Unlike Ponant, Viking doesn’t have an independent association choose scientists for each voyage. Instead, it partners with the University of Cambridge, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and NOAA, which send their researchers to work with Viking’s onboard science officers.
“Some people think marine research is sticking some kids on a ship to take measurements,” says Stanwell-Smith. “But we know we can do first-rate science—not spin.” Other cruise lines are also embracing sustainability initiatives, with coral-reef-restoration projects and water-quality measurements, usually in partnership with universities. Just about every vessel has “citizen-scientist” research programs allowing guests the opportunity to count birds or pick up discarded plastic on beaches. So far, Ponant and Viking are the only lines with serious research labs. Ponant is adding science officers to other vessels in its fleet. As part of the initiatives, scientists deliver onboard lectures and sometimes invite passengers to assist in their research.
Given the shortage of research vessels, Stanwell-Smith thinks this passenger-funded system will coexist nicely with current NGO- and government-owned ships. “This could be a new paradigm for exploring the sea,” he says. “Maybe the next generation of research vessels will look like ours.”
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Watch of the Week: the Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon
The new release claims the throne as the world’s thinnest Tourbillon.
Piaget, the watchmaker’s watchmaker, has once again redefined the meaning of “ultra-thin” thanks to its newest masterpiece, the Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon—the world’s thinnest tourbillon watch.
In the world of high-watchmaking where thin is never thin enough—look at the ongoing battle between Piaget, Bulgari, and Richard Mille for the honours—Piaget caused a furore at Watches & Wonders in Geneva when it unveiled its latest feat to coincide with the Maison’s 150th year anniversary.
Piaget claims that the new Altiplano is “shaped by a quest for elegance and driven by inventiveness”, and while this might be true, it’s clear that the Maison’s high-watchmaking divisions in La Côte-aux-Fées and Geneva are also looking to end the conversation around who owns the ultra-thin watchmaking category.
The new Altiplano pushes the boundaries of horological ingenuity 67 years after Piaget invented its first ultra-thin calibre—the revered 9P—and six years after it presented the world’s then-thinnest watch, the Altiplano Ultimate Concept. Now, with the release of this unrivalled timepiece at just 2mm thick—the same as its predecessor, yet now housing the beat of a flying tourbillon, prized by watchmaking connoisseurs—you can’t help but marvel at its ultra-thin mastery, whether the timepiece is to your liking or not.
In comparison, the Bulgari Octo Finissimo Tourbillon was 3.95mm thick when unveiled in 2020, which seems huge on paper compared to what Piaget has been able to produce. But to craft a watch as thin and groundbreaking as its predecessor, now with an added flying tourbillon complication, the whole watchmaking process had to be revalued and reinvented.
“We did far more than merely add a tourbillon,” says Benjamin Comar, Piaget CEO. “We reinvented everything.”
After three years of R&D, trial and error—and a redesign of 90 percent of the original Altiplano Ultimate Concept components—the 2024 version needs to be held and seen to be believed. The end product certainly isn’t a watch for the everyday watch wearer—although Piaget will tell you otherwise—but in many ways, the company didn’t conjure a timepiece like the Altiplano as a profit-seeking exercise. Instead, overcoming such an arduous and technical watchmaking feat proves that Piaget can master the flying tourbillon in such a whimsical fashion and, in the process, subvert the current state-of-the-art technical principles by making an impactful visual—and technical—statement.
The only question left to ask is, what’s next, Piaget?
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Model: Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon 150th Anniversary
Diameter: 41.5 mm
Thickness: 2 mm (crystal included)
Material: M64BC cobalt alloy, blue PVD -treated
Dial: Monobloc dial; polished round and baton indices, Bâton-shaped hand for the minutes Monobloc disc with a hand for the hours
Water resistance: 20m
Movement: Calibre 970P-UC, one-minute peripheral tourbillon
Winding: Hand-wound
Functions: hours, minutes, and small seconds (time-only)
Power reserve: 40 hours
Availability: Limited production, not numbered
Price: Price on request
