Austrian motorway police arrested a 36-year-old Croatian man at a petrol station on the A9 near Graz shortly after 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 28, and recovered Mate Rimac’s Bugatti Chiron, according to a report from Landespolizeidirektion Steiermark. Police say the car, valued at about €3 million (roughly $3.3 million at the European Central Bank’s Oct. 28 reference rate), was stolen that afternoon near Zagreb, Croatia. Rimac said afterward that the keys were inside it.
Keys in the car, no fence around the campus
Rimac described the theft in a video he posted on Facebook on Oct. 29, which N1 and tportal summarized. By his account, the man walked onto the Rimac Kampus in Sveta Nedelja, got into the Chiron and drove away. Rimac said he has left keys in his cars for years, the Chiron and the Nevera among them, so employees can move and test them, and that nothing had happened until now. He told viewers he felt safe in Croatia. He also said the man had come to the company looking for work; police have said nothing about a motive.
tportal reported that the campus has no fences or heavy security. Croatia Week reported that the grounds are open but the factory building itself requires an access card, and that the theft went unnoticed at first because colleagues and friends often take the Chiron out and Rimac does not always know where it is.
Tracked by telemetry to an Austrian petrol station
Croatia Week reported that someone saw a person driving the car and suspected it was stolen, and that Rimac called police and had his team pull the Chiron’s telemetry, which reports location, speed and fuel level. The data showed the car heading for Slovenia. Rimac followed in his Porsche 911, Croatia Week reported, hoping the driver would have to stop for fuel before reaching Austria.
N1’s summary of the video adds that an Austrian police officer was in a group chat with Rimac’s team and received the updated location, and that Rimac counted about ten police vehicles and twenty officers at the stop. The police report says the man drove through Slovenia and crossed into Austria at the Spielfeld border crossing, and credits cooperation between Slovenian and Austrian authorities for the search that ended at Seiersberg-Pirka. By the police account, the theft in the afternoon and the arrest after 7 p.m. were the same day.
What the Austrian police report says about charges
The report says the man gave a full confession when questioned. On the order of the Graz public prosecutor’s office, he is being reported while at liberty; the report names no charge and no detention order. Theft investigators from the Landeskriminalamt Steiermark took over the case, and the car has been returned to Rimac. A confession to police is not a conviction, and no statement from the man or a lawyer for him appears in anything I read.
Rimac said he will not sue the man personally but that, with a car worth millions of euros involved, the justice system will prosecute. Austria’s report puts the case with Graz prosecutors. Neither account says whether it ends up in an Austrian or a Croatian court.
New York’s law on keys in unattended cars
Leaving the key in a parked car is a problem in New York, too. Section 1210(a) of the Vehicle and Traffic Law says you have to stop the engine, lock the ignition and take the key out, unless the key is hidden from sight for convenience or emergency. The section as I read it carries no penalty. Other states have their own versions, and I checked only New York’s text, not Croatian or Austrian rules.
The National Insurance Crime Bureau counted 229,339 vehicles stolen with keys or fobs left inside from 2016 through 2018, a 56 percent increase over 2015, in a March 2019 release. California led with 31,185 and Florida followed with 17,300. Those figures are seven years old, and I did not find a newer count from the bureau. Rimac’s Chiron had the same weakness as those cars. It also had a recovery setup almost no one else gets: live telemetry, and an owner tailing it in a Porsche 911 with an Austrian cop in the group chat.
What happens next
Graz prosecutors have not announced a decision, and the police report gives no court date. Rimac said he will stop leaving keys in his cars. His message to the next thief, in N1’s account: there are no keys in them now, and nobody gets far with one without his company anyway.
Rimac tailed his own stolen Chiron in a Porsche 911 while an Austrian cop sat in the group chat. Would you have followed, or called it in and stayed put?
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