The car business is quietly separating into two worlds that have less and less to do with each other. For most drivers, the future looks electric, affordable, and increasingly built in China. At the very top, where a single vehicle can cost more than a house, the story is different. In an interview with CNBC’s wealth editor Robert Frank, Mate Rimac, the chief executive of the French supercar maker Bugatti, said the most expensive cars on the road will keep their combustion engines “for a very long time.” That is a striking claim, partly because of who is making it.
Rimac, who is 38, built his reputation on electric power. His Croatian company made its name with battery-driven hypercars before he took charge of Bugatti in 2021. So when someone with that background says gasoline engines are not disappearing at the luxury end, it carries weight. His argument is not about nostalgia. It is about how wealthy buyers actually behave, and it starts with an unlikely comparison.
He points to Swiss watches. Smartwatches now do far more than a mechanical timepiece ever could, and they dominate the mass market. Yet the old-fashioned Swiss watch has not vanished. Rimac notes that only around 5% of the world’s watches are made in Switzerland, while roughly 90% of the industry’s profits are earned there. The lesson, in his telling, is that convenience and raw capability do not decide the top of a market. As he put it, a smartwatch can do a great deal, but no one will pay $200,000 for one.
The same logic, he argues, applies to cars. Electric hypercars are astonishing machines. They accelerate harder than almost any gasoline car ever built, and they do it in near silence. But that silence is part of the problem for a certain kind of buyer. Much of what makes an expensive combustion car desirable has little to do with lap times. It is the sound, the vibration, the sense of mechanical theater, and the knowledge that very few of these objects exist. Electric power can win the numbers contest and still leave that emotional appetite unfed.
There is a deeper point underneath the performance debate. Rimac suggests that the wealthiest buyers increasingly want objects that feel personal to them. Customizations, special commissions, and true one-offs are becoming a bigger part of the business, because a car built to one person’s specification says something a mass-produced product cannot. In that world, an engine assembled by hand is not outdated technology. It is a form of craftsmanship, closer to a piece of art than to transportation.
This helps explain choices that look strange from the outside. Rather than follow the industry toward batteries, Bugatti has gone in the opposite direction with its newest car, giving it a freshly designed sixteen-cylinder engine and instruments made in the tradition of fine watchmaking. It is a bet that the people who can afford these cars are buying feeling and rarity, not efficiency.
None of this means electric power is losing. For ordinary drivers, and for a great many performance cars too, the shift toward batteries looks firmly underway. What Rimac is describing is a split rather than a contest, with two markets that reward completely different things. One is racing toward technology, low cost, and scale. The other is retreating, on purpose, toward heritage, scarcity, and the human hand.
That divide is worth watching, because it challenges a comfortable assumption that every industry moves in one direction at once. If Rimac is right, the combustion engine will not die at the top of the car market. It will simply become something else, a luxury in its own right, valued precisely because most of the world has moved on.
