There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of Pininfarina. Yet the Italian design house is responsible for some of the most beautiful vehicles to wear four wheels. Its Battista hypercar has nearly 1,900 horsepower and proudly displays the Pininfarina badge on its bonnet, but it has taken 90 years for the coachbuilder to have a car to call its own.
Founded in 1930 by Battista “Pinin” Farina, one of the youngest and, and 5ft, smallest brothers in the family — hence the nickname Pinin — Farina went on to make his company one of the most influential design houses, alongside greats such as Bertone, Ghia and Zagato. Pininfarina became the family’s official surname after the President of Italy allowed him to formally change it. The 1947 Cisitalia 202 Berlinetta is perhaps his masterpiece, and is on permanent display at MoMA in New York. This, the first car in the museum’s collection, is a testament to Pininfarina’s impact on postwar car design.
The company’s subsequent output is an exhaustive archive of greatest hits, such as the elegant Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider from 1955. And Pininfarina’s influence extends beyond cars — it has designed high-speed trains, private jets, and the Olympic torch for the 2006 Winter Olympics, held in the company’s home town of Turin.
Its most enduring collaboration was with Ferrari. After the two stubborn company principals met in a restaurant in Tortona, halfway between their bases — neither willing to go to the other’s patch — the resulting relationship lasted over sixty years. Pininfarina produced hundreds of memorable cars that wore the prancing horse on the front but the “Designed by Pininfarina” badge on the side. The Ferrari relationship produced many gems, including the 246 GT and the 365 GT4 BB. It ended in 2013 when Centro Stile became Ferraris’s in-house design centre. After decades of designing cars for manufacturers it’s hardly surprising that Pininfarina decided to build a car of its own.
Starting at more than £2 million and fittingly named after the company’s founder, the Battista represents the latest in cutting-edge electric vehicle technology. Produced by one of the foremost styling houses in Italy, it delves into the archive to blend heritage with progressive design, creating a vehicle that comfortably acknowledges its history while looking forward. The chief design officer Dave Amantea calls it “retrofuturism.
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The electric hypercar has all the required performance statistics. It can do 62mph in 1.86 seconds, but as sensational as that is you won’t find yourself doing it too often — the effect is too dramatic on body and mind. Imagine sitting in the front seat of the fastest-accelerating roller coaster at Alton Towers and feeling your stomach lurch as it catapults away from the start. It’s faster and more violent than that … and you’re steering. It’s exhilarating and discombobulating. You have to remind yourself to breathe and blink — the G-force and wide-eyed shock will have paused most basic human functions. Speaking is almost impossible. Your passenger, meanwhile, will be testing how many expletives they can spill out in less than two seconds, before you hit the brake pedal.
But, parlour tricks out of the way, the car is a serious performer. An electric motor at each wheel allows for impressive torque vectoring that gives it car a lightness on its feet that belies its weight of more than 2,000kg.
The four drive modes, selected using a space-age rotary dial on the driver’s door, have different character traits. Calma is the nursery slopes setting. Using a third of the car’s capacity, it is still more powerful than 99 per cent of the cars on the road. This mode feels like a luxurious golf cart in an exotic dress. It will help the car to achieve its 296-mile range on a full charge, but it is not what the vehicle was built for.
Each turn of the dial induces a giggling “dare I?” moment as you cycle through Pura and Energica (a massive understatement) to Furioso (not an overstatement), which unleashes the full Krakatoa of 1,874 horsepower. It’s impressive, not least because you are doing all this in near silence, unless you prefer the soundscape, a curated aspect of the Battista. Realising that electric cars lack the visceral scream of a naturally aspirated V12, Pininfarina has engineered something it is calling the “voice” of Battista, “Suono Puro”. More than two thousand hours have gone into the sound’s composition, development and fine-tuning, and it incorporates the “wellbeing qualities associated with the 432Hz frequency”. It’s a deep, pulsating theme tune that makes it feel as though the Battista is alive. It is hoped that this will become Battista’s signature sound.
The performance is staggering, but this being a Pininfarina the emphasis is as much on how it looks as how it goes. It is unsurprisingly a design-driven company, and Amantea is passionate about not offering the same configuration on two cars. “This is not my job. It is my dream job,” he explains, wanting “every Battista to be different, with a different story.”
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A comic book story is behind one of the latest creations. In June Warner Bros set up the Wayne Enterprises Experience in Gotham City (otherwise known as NYC). The project imagines what the townhouse of Bruce Wayne, the alter ego of Batman, would look like. It features luxury products from the worlds of fashion, jewellery, technology and mobility. One car was going to grace the fictional billionaire’s garage. Amantea created a uniquely specified Dark Knight Battista featuring a Nero Profondo exterior with black leather, Alcantara upholstery and black and gold-contrast stitching. Good enough for Batman is not a bad endorsement.
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