The Battista mixes Pininfarina heritage with 1,900bhp of electric power... a godsend
But elsewhere, there’s talk of creating “the first car to make the world love electric vehicles” – acknowledgement that, unless you’re one of Elon’s Tesla evangelists (a Muskovite?), the fast-forwarding electric revolution has yet to deliver a car you’d stick on your metaphorical bedroom wall. Unless you dig Croatian start-up Rimac or China’s NIO EP9. So, is the Battista The One?
This is where the Pininfarina part should come in handy, because the history this name can leverage is pretty much the history of the car itself. Certainly car design. With just one exception, every Ferrari series production car to have emerged from Maranello between 1951 and 2008 wore the funky little Pininfarina imprint on its body somewhere (Ferrari’s in-house Centro Stile, recently installed in an amazing new building, has been in charge for the past decade.) That’s an unrivalled aesthetic winning streak.
And there’s romance. Battista ‘Pinin’ Farina was the youngest son in a family of 11 kids, and proved precociously talented in the pioneering days of the automobile. He began working in his brother Giovanni’s body shop at 12, and as a teenager met Fiat founder Giovanni Agnelli and Henry Ford.
This story is from the April 2019 edition of BBC TopGear India.
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This story is from the April 2019 edition of BBC TopGear India.
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