Pininfarina is going where Bugatti fears to tread, claiming its upcoming all-electric Battista hypercar will be the most powerful car ever built.
The famed Italian styling and niche-manufacturing house insists its Battista, named after the actual name of its legendary founder Pinin Farina, will boast 1420kW of power and 2300Nm of torque.
Due to be shown officially at next year’s Geneva motor show in March, the all-wheel drive hypercar is claimed to accelerate beyond 100km/h in less than two seconds and a top speed beyond 400km/h, helping create a halo car that will sit at the top of a looming Automobili Pininfarina range of electric sports cars.
Pininfarina is also claiming a range of 500km between recharges for the Battista – though, presumably, not whilst travelling at 400km/h.
Yet Bugatti boss and former Lamborghini president Stefan Winkelmann has insisted he will only electrify his company’s powertrains when the technology was “cutting edge”.
Despite other brands inside the Volkswagen Group making collective EV commitments of more than €100 billion over the next half a decade, Bugatti isn’t playing zero-emissions ball. Winkelmann has frequently insisted the Chiron’s ultimate replacement will not be an EV.
The oddest thing about that is that some of the key EV technologies that Pininfarina will fit to the Battista come from Croatian company Rimac, which is part-owned (10 per cent) by Bugatti sister company Porsche.
Pininfarina, now owned by India’s Mahindra & Mahindra, plans to launch the production Battista in 2020. It insists it will build no more than 150 of the EV hypercars, which are due to sell at between £1.5 and £2 million.
“This is genuinely a dream come true,” Pininfarina chairman Paolo Farina said.
“My grandfather always had the vision that one day there would be a stand-alone range of Pininfarina-branded cars. For me, we simply had to call it Battista.”
Automobili Pininfarina’s EV credentials have been built, in part, by Mahindra’s history as a founding contender in Formula E and it has poached ex-Volkswagen Group executive Michael Perschke to run the day-to-day operations.