Pininfarina Battista: Beauty and the Beast
For 90 years, Pininfarina designed the world’s most beautiful cars for other people — mostly Ferrari, but also Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Fiat, BMW, and dozens of others. In 2019, they decided it was time to build their own. The Battista — named after the company’s founder, Battista “Pinin” Farina — is the first production car sold under the Automobili Pininfarina brand. It is also, by a significant margin, the most powerful road-legal car ever made in Italy, and one of the fastest-accelerating production vehicles ever built.
The Legacy: 90 Years of Italian Design
To appreciate the significance of the Battista, it helps to understand what Pininfarina represents in the history of automotive design.
Battista “Pinin” Farina was born in 1893 in Cortanze, a village in the Piedmont wine country of northwestern Italy. His nickname “Pinin” — Piedmontese dialect for “the little one” — was given to him as a child and stayed with him throughout his life; in 1961, the Italian government officially changed his last name to Pininfarina by presidential decree, in recognition of his contributions to Italian culture and industry.
He established his coachbuilding house in Turin in 1930. The partnership with Ferrari — which would become the most important designer-manufacturer relationship in automotive history — began in 1952 with the Ferrari 212 Inter. Over the following seven decades, Pininfarina designed virtually every road-going Ferrari: the 250 GT Berlinetta, the 275 GTB, the Daytona, the 308 GTB, the Testarossa, the F40, the F355, the 360 Modena, the F430, the 458 Italia, the 488 GTB, and many others. Each of these cars is a landmark of automotive design, and each bears Pininfarina’s stylistic signature — a combination of elegance, proportion, and restraint that the Italians call bella figura.
In 2015, Mahindra — the Indian industrial conglomerate — acquired Pininfarina. Under new ownership, the company decided to move from pure design consultancy to car manufacturing. The Automobili Pininfarina brand was established in 2018, and the Battista was announced at the Geneva Motor Show in 2019.
The Rimac Connection: Engineering Partnership
Pininfarina is a design house. It has 90 years of experience making cars beautiful. It does not have 90 years of experience designing electric powertrains, battery management systems, torque vectoring software, or high-voltage safety systems. For these, it needed a partner.
The partner was Rimac Automobili — at the time of the Battista’s development, a fast-growing Croatian electric hypercar company that had just completed development of the C_Two (later renamed the Nevera). The commercial arrangement was straightforward: Pininfarina would license Rimac’s rolling chassis, battery system, and electric drivetrain, and install it under their own body and interior. Rimac would receive a partner to expand the commercial reach of their platform technology.
The Shared Platform:
- Battery: A 120 kWh battery pack — identical to the Rimac Nevera’s unit — provides energy storage. The pack is mounted in the floor of the car for optimal weight distribution and center of gravity.
- Motors: Four electric motors — one at each wheel — provide the power. Each motor is independently controlled by the torque vectoring software.
- Power Electronics: The inverters, battery management system, and charging electronics are Rimac-designed units, shared between the Battista and the Nevera.
The Numbers: The shared platform delivers 1,900 hp (1,417 kW) and 2,340 Nm of torque — figures that have no precedent in road-legal Italian automotive history. The 0–100 km/h time of 1.86 seconds places the Battista among the top three fastest-accelerating production cars ever built.
Despite sharing the mechanical platform, the Battista and the Nevera feel and behave differently. Rimac’s and Pininfarina’s software teams tuned the torque vectoring, the regenerative braking, and the power delivery curves differently, reflecting their different design philosophies.
Design: The Single Line
Where the Rimac Nevera is a technical exercise in aerodynamic efficiency, the Battista is a design exercise in Italian elegance. The two cars, sharing identical mechanical platforms, look nothing alike.
The Battista’s exterior follows Pininfarina’s “single line” philosophy — the idea that the most beautiful and most legible design is one that can be described with a single flowing line from the nose to the tail. The Cisitalia 202 of 1947 — also designed by Pininfarina — was the original expression of this philosophy. The Battista is its contemporary descendant.
Surfaces: The Battista’s body surfaces are smooth, curved, and free of the aerodynamic appendages — vents, winglets, ducts — that characterize most performance cars. The lines flow from the hood over the roof and down to the tail without interruption. The headlights and taillights are thin, horizontal elements that emphasize the car’s width.
Brake Flap: The one dramatic aerodynamic element on the Battista appears only under braking: a full-width rear spoiler rises from the tail when the driver applies the brakes, acting as an airbrake to supplement the regenerative and mechanical braking systems. At rest, it is invisible. Under braking, it is the most theatrical element of the car’s aerodynamic system.
Color: Pininfarina offers the Battista in a range of colors developed specifically for the car, including several special effects that would be impossible on a conventional painted surface. “Bianco Sestriere” — a white with pearl metallic flake — is the signature color, referencing the Piedmontese ski resort near the Pininfarina family’s origins.
Sound: Suono Puro
An electric car has no engine. Without an engine, it has no voice — and a car without a voice lacks an important dimension of character. Pininfarina’s solution was neither to ignore this issue nor to fake engine sounds, but to create something entirely new.
The company hired acoustic engineers who spent months analyzing the frequencies generated by the Battista’s electric drivetrain — the motors, the inverters, the reduction gearboxes — and identified a characteristic frequency of 54 Hz that the drivetrain generates naturally at certain operating conditions. Rather than suppressing this frequency, they amplified it and transmitted it through the chassis and body structure. The result is a subtle, physical vibration that the occupants experience more as a sensation than a sound — something that resonates in the sternum rather than in the ears.
Pininfarina calls this “Suono Puro” — Pure Sound. It is a response to the challenge of giving an electric hypercar a voice without dishonestly faking a combustion engine. Whether it succeeds is a matter of individual judgment, but the philosophy is admirable: acknowledge what the car is and find an authentic way to communicate its character rather than masking it with theater.
Driving Modes: Calma to Furiosa
Pininfarina’s software team tuned the Battista’s drivetrain characteristics differently from Rimac’s Nevera, reflecting the different character they wanted the car to express. The driving modes progress from restrained to extreme:
Calma (Calm): Maximum regenerative braking, limited power output, smooth throttle response. The Battista in Calma mode is a near-silent luxury grand tourer — comfortable, refined, and capable of covering highway distances with minimal drama.
Pura (Pure): Standard all-wheel-drive operation with proportionate power delivery. The Battista’s performance is fully available but delivered progressively rather than violently.
Energica (Energetic): Sport configuration with sharper throttle response and reduced electronic intervention. The car communicates more urgency and requires more driver input.
Furiosa (Furious): Full 1,900 hp, all electronic intervention minimized, all four motors at maximum output. The Battista in Furiosa mode is violent, immediate, and disorienting in a way that few cars of any type can match. The 1.86-second 0–100 km/h time is achieved in this mode.
Carattere (Character): Rear-wheel bias configuration that allows controlled oversteer for drivers who want to explore the car’s handling limits on track.
Production: 150 Examples Worldwide
Only 150 Battistas were manufactured — 50 for each of three regional markets (Europe, North America, and Middle East/Asia). Each car was priced at approximately €2 million before taxes.
All 150 were sold before the car entered production. The buyers are Pininfarina enthusiasts, serious Ferrari collectors who follow the design house’s work independently of any specific brand, and collectors of electric hypercars who prioritize aesthetics over the Rimac Nevera’s more engineering-focused proposition.
The Battista proved several things simultaneously: that Pininfarina could operate successfully as a car manufacturer rather than a design consultant; that the Rimac platform could support multiple distinct products with different characters; that there was a market for an electric hypercar positioned on design heritage rather than performance specifications; and that the future of Italian automotive design did not require a combustion engine to express itself beautifully.
It is the prettier sister of the Nevera, and arguably the most beautiful electric car ever made.