Rimac’s Robotaxis – The Matter is Not Black and White

The robotaxi project of Mate Rimac is a hot topic as the official period for using funds from the NPOO is coming to an end; however, it is no longer primarily a technological story. At the moment when the project, for which nearly 180 million euros of European money was contracted, is concluding, it becomes a test of the Croatian system for managing and controlling EU funds, on which there is now a great responsibility because the state will have to do what it should do for every user: coldly and objectively determine what was promised, what was delivered, what is an acceptable cost, and how much support truly belongs to the user for that.

In recent days, the public has most frequently discussed the amount of 89.7 million euros and the question of whether the user, Verne, will have to return it. However, this amount is an advance, not the final approved amount of support for the implemented project. The initial Grant Agreement was concluded, through a direct award procedure, for approximately 179 million euros.

It is important for the interested public to understand several important aspects of this story.

It’s Not Either – Or

The first is that, until the user submits the final request for reimbursement of funds, we do not know how much funding they will ultimately claim, justify the advance, whether they will claim the remaining contracted funds, what the final status of previously excluded costs will be, and how much the relevant authorities will ultimately determine as acceptable. In other words, today we do not know the financial basis to which any potential correction would be applied.

The second important aspect of the whole story is that we do not know the final answer to the more important question – to what extent the contractual obligations have been fulfilled.

In the public debate, the project has almost entirely been reduced to the question of whether there is a fully autonomous level five vehicle. This is an important contracted result (at least that is implied by several publicly available official documents), and the fact that it remained unchanged after the contract amendments will certainly be subject to verification.

However, the goal of the Call is defined more broadly. It anticipates the development and introduction of a completely new urban mobility ecosystem (MaaS model), closely integrated with public urban transport, which includes several different achievements.

This is an important distinction because the Rules on Financial Corrections do not recognize only a black-and-white situation in which the project either completely succeeded or completely failed. If the planned project goal has not been achieved, a hundred percent correction of the acceptable costs of the contract is anticipated. If the goal has been partially achieved, and the project is functional, a flat financial correction is anticipated, meaning that the amount of the correction, and thus the reimbursement, is determined according to the rate of (in)success of the project.

The broadly defined purpose of the project therefore leaves the user room to argue that at least part of the goal has been achieved, but that does not mean that specific contracted results and indicators become irrelevant. On the contrary, the responsible authorities will have to evaluate each of them and determine whether there is a deviation and how significant it is for the realization of the project.

Here we come to perhaps the most sensitive part of the entire process. Some indicators are not determined by simply counting pieces or checking one invoice, but their achievement is proven descriptively and qualitatively. The burden of assessment and responsibility now falls on the management and control system bodies, which will have to evaluate what has truly been delivered, whether it corresponds to the contracted functionalities, how much any deviation affects the project, and whether the project, despite the non-fulfillment of certain elements, can be considered functional.

This is not a simple mathematical calculation, but a professional decision that must be equally well justified whether the correction is small, large, or does not occur at all.

Institutional Test

There is another significant unknown in this regard. The public has access to the Call, Instructions, and part of the contractual documentation, but not the complete project proposal based on which the support was granted. Therefore, we do not know whether the user described certain results and functionalities in more detail, took on additional obligations, or made promises that exceed what we read today in the Call.

Therefore, today no one who does not have access to the entire project file can responsibly claim either that Verne will return all the money or that they will not return anything; thus, the real test of the project is no longer exclusively technological but institutional.

In a project worth nearly 180 million euros, the public must ultimately be able to obtain very simple answers: what was contracted, what was delivered, how much was recognized, what was not achieved, and how any potential financial correction was calculated. Not because the project is called ‘Robotaxi’ and not because it is backed by Mate Rimac, but because the same rules must apply to every user of European money.