Divine Spark

The Battista mixes Pininfarina heritage with 1,900bhp of electric power... a godsend

- Jason Barlow

In the midst of a welter of startling facts, those tasked with communicating the Pininfarina Battista have plenty to draw on. It’s the most powerful road-legal car ever to come out of Italy, a country that’s produced its fair share of powerful, road-legal cars. Thanks to a 120kWh lithiumion battery pack and an electric motor on each wheel, it produces approximately 1,900bhp and 2301Nm. Both are barmy and imbue the Battista with an accelerative urge to rival an F1 car. Zero to 100kph takes a tarmac-melting sub-two seconds, 300kph up in less than 12. All without the haze of spent hydrocarbons. Welcome, high-net worth, guilt-free, zero-emissions ultra-performance.

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.