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Pininfarina, the company best well known for its association with Ferrari, wants to break free from under the shade of the Prancing Horse and make a name for itself as the builder of the fastest car to come out of Italy. The name of this car? Battista, like the name of the company’s founder. The numbers that should firmly plant this car on the map? 1,900 horsepower and 1,696 pound-feet, a 0 to 62 mph sprint in less than two seconds, and a top speed of about 250 mph. All done by an EV powertrain that’s capable of running over 300 miles between charges.
Reading those numbers it’s easy to dismiss the Pininfarina Battista as just another ludicrous car that will never actually become reality. Something like the Devel Sixteen, the Arabian hypercar that packs a V-16 engine that’s capable of 5,000 horsepower. That one was supposedly slated to start final testing this month. Or the equally insane Vector WX-8, Jerry Wiegert’s project that should’ve brought his once proud company back from the dead. He said 12 years ago that a 10-liter, twin-turbocharged, V-8 will power the car and that it will crank out 1,850 horsepower. More recently, Wiegert sold his two WX-3 prototypes to fund the project.
But the Battista is a more serious offering than both those elusive creations. First off, Pininfarina was bought by Mahindra four years ago for $190.6 million and, as we know, Mahindra has the financial power to throw cash at a project like this if so desires. With Pininfarina aiming to build just 150 of these, 50 dedicated to each of its three markets: Europe, America, and the Middle-East, we can expect people to actually come forth with pre-orders once it gets revealed at Geneva in a couple of weeks.
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