Reimagining the Driver Experience
Rimac Technology, headquartered in Zagreb, Croatia, is a standalone business unit within the freshly incorporated Rimac Group. Together with its sister company Bugatti Rimac, Rimac Technology shares the visionary leadership of Mate Rimac as CEO. With over 1,300 employees, Rimac Technology designs, engineers, and produces high-performance EV components and systems to help the global automotive industry build great hybrid and electric vehicles. Today, Rimac Technology serves as a tier-1 supplier of cutting-edge turnkey solutions to an extensive list of the world’s most prestigious car manufacturers.
On previous projects, we leveraged in-house protocols and endpoints that worked well at the proof-of-concept level but proved cumbersome for scale-ups. HiveMQ not only gives us the enterprise-grade performance we need but also the benefit of professional support that is crucial in areas such as automotive. These are notable advantages over open-source solutions.
Leveraging the HiveMQ MQTT Broker for Fast, Reliable Data Delivery
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Rimac Technology is responsible for the development of a complete telematics solution that is built to satisfy the entire vehicle lifecycle, from research and development to production and after-sales. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) such as Bugatti Rimac need a flexible and reliable method of ingesting and analyzing large amounts of data from hundreds and thousands of sensors in near-real-time. Production use cases require a robust data backbone that can provide a rich user experience for connected vehicles worldwide. Rimac’s target market is the premium supercar and high-performance segment where limited volumes and flawless user experience pose unique challenges. After the initial development phase of the platform, Rimac chose the HiveMQ MQTT broker to ensure optimal low-latency transfer of telematics data between connected vehicles and the cloud. HiveMQ’s robust scaling and out-of-the-box support for integration with backend systems such as Apache Kafka were key factors in the decision.
Harnessing Real-time Data to Shape the Future and Redefine Performance
The in-house team at Rimac Technology handles the ideation, development, and testing of a wide range of high-performance electric drive train components and vehicle systems. Products range from low-level electronic control units such as seat controls and locking mechanisms to top-level solutions such as HMI (human-vehicle interface) systems or bespoke battery technologies for the most demanding projects. At Rimac, a single vehicle can continuously stream data from more than 5,000 MQTT sensors at a rate up to 1,000 times per second. The HiveMQ broker plays a pivotal role in guaranteeing that Rimac engineers have all that data at their fingertips no matter where the vehicle is located. The use of the lightweight MQTT communication protocol together with the full-featured enterprise HiveMQ MQTT broker gives Rimac the ability to reliably pipe huge amounts of MQTT data from anywhere in the world in near real-time.
Rimac engineers deploy HiveMQ for reliable 2-way communication between vehicle and cloud. The superior ability of MQTT to tolerate and recover from unstable networks and poor connectivity has made a positive impact on development. Rimac’s cloud-based backend solution utilizes the bidirectional transfer of MQTT telematics data over the HiveMQ MQTT broker to fulfill multiple use cases such as over-the-air (OTA) updates, remote commands, and detailed vehicle diagnostics by Rimac engineers. The high availability and excellent message throughput of the HiveMQ broker are important factors in providing the exceptional HMI experience for vehicle owners that Rimac is known for.
Rimac Connectivity Platform Architecture Overview
The cloud portion of the Rimac Connectivity Platform is hosted on AWS and divided into two subsystems:
The Connectivity subsystem is responsible for processing the data that is sent from vehicles and storing the data to various interfaces & databases.
The Gateway subsystem is responsible for providing the APIs that Rimac customers can use to build their own user interfacing applications (mobile apps, web apps, and more).
Working in unison, the connectivity and gateway systems deliver near real-time data delivery to Rimac users. The Rimac platform incorporates InfluxDB, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, and Redis for data storage. Apache Kafka serves as the data backbone combined with microservices written in Scala and a GraphQL API layer written in NodeJS. Although the initial setup of a distributed cluster on AWS was a technical challenge, Rimac found that integration of HiveMQ into their backend system was easy thanks to the HiveMQ Enterprise Extension for Kafka.
The introduction of HiveMQ has allowed us to shift our focus away from the low-level efforts such as QoS, link management, and identification towards the actual data delivery and its usage. We see HiveMQ as a crucial tool to support us in our growth as a tier-1 supplier providing solutions that scale into thousands and allowing us to focus on high-level problems such as preventive maintenance, big data, AI, and more.
Rimac Technology is currently ramping up capacity to handle the production of tens of thousands of high-performance systems per year by 2024. Further expansion plans are expected to push production volumes to the hundreds of thousands with products ranging from small hybrid battery systems to full rolling chassis. Based on the innovation-packed years that the HiveMQ MQTT broker has already been deployed in the Rimac environment, Rimac Technology is confident in their continued choice of HiveMQ for a critical piece of their time-to-market, future scalability, and flawless UX.