2023 was quite a busy year for Italian carmaker Automobili Pininfarina. Starting in February, the brand’s first production model, the Battista, began smashing production records left and right. It briefly became the world’s quickest production car while also setting quarter and half-mile records in the process. Later in the summer, it unveiled the Battista Edizione Nino Farina, an ultra-limited take on its electric hypercar, at the famed Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Monterey Car Week in August saw two further unveils. The first was the brand’s Pura Vision Concept, a tall, all-electric, off-roader aimed at showcasing the aesthetic the brand’s future products will adopt. Sharing the stage directly next to it sat the B95 and roofless take on the Battista, which Pininfarina plans to build just ten of. Overall, 2023 saw 12 months of back-to-back action for the hypercar segment’s “newest” player.
To kick off this year, I sat down with Dave Amantea, Automobili Pininfarina’s Chief Design Officer, to discuss the whirlwind year that just concluded, some of his design philosophies, and what may come next for the marque.
Disclaimer: some responses have been edited for clarity.
dR: Let’s start by revisiting last year’s Monterey Car Week. What was the reception like for B95? Was it what you expected?
Overwhelming. I have to be honest. We are trying to do something really special. Of course, we’re carrying on a big name. Our heritage comes from Pininfarina S.p.A., so there are more than 94 years of history. There’s a sort of pressure when you’re designing things with the Pininfarina name on them.
We decided to be bold and go beyond what people could expect. Until that moment, any customer in the entire automotive community was looking at us like a brand launching a single fully-electric program for a new market, something really new considering we started in 2018. Nowadays, talking about an electric car, even in the hyper-segment, looks like something usual, but in 2018, there was a lot of skepticism.
The reaction was really overwhelming because it’s really amazing how, from 2018 to 2023, there was this big shift, and we acknowledged that the customer was starving for something new. When they saw that something above Battista was coming, the look in the customer’s eyes paid back all the hours in the office and these frustrations because we wanted to get on the market soon with something else.
B95 had to be something special. For this reason, it has no roof and no windscreen because it is the first barchetta ever built on an electric vehicle platform, and it’s the very first barchetta that is a hyper barchetta.
Together with it, we showcased the Pura Vision. That is the vision we created in order to generate Battista, but also B95. We chose probably the most savage way to get in contact with our followers, but also haters.
We know that there are a lot of people that love exhaust pipes. I’m one who loves exhaust pipes. But the thing is, we don’t want to substitute an era. We want to just say that a new era is coming. And in the tradition of our heritage, of Automobili Pininfarina, we want to again lead this era in the automotive [industry].
B95 is saying that we are ready. We are ready to shape other cars because we know this technology inside out. We have collected data for over five years. We are probably the brand with the most electric hypercars on the ground where customers are physically driving their cars and not keeping them in the garage. This helps us to collect a lot of data. We are growing fast.
dR: Given that the Pura Vision Concept is a tall luxury-oriented off-roader, did it being electric give you more design freedoms? Could you play with proportions in ways you couldn’t with an internal combustion vehicle?
Actually, this is one of the secrets that people don’t know. Pura Vision started as a parallel program with Battista, just delayed by six months.
Since the beginning, one of the things we kept in mind is that we should create an object [Pura Vision] that could be an inspiration while we were designing something [Battista] so futuristic because cars have to be persistent in the market for many years.
The only way to showcase that we were capable of creating an iconic design, pure and simple, was to put it side by side with a vision, a vision that was not presented in 2019. It was presented to the public last year. This is surprising, and this is the connection between a futuristic car like the Pura Vision that inspired a product that exists, one you can purchase today.
Pura Vision is a concept that is going to demonstrate that our recipe to create a pure design, what we call our Pura philosophy, is a recipe that allows us to balance design ingredients so well to create the perfect taste. The secret is to be simple.
dR: Regarding customer requests, have they asked for a third body style? Maybe not a hypercar or an SUV, but a sedan, perhaps?
Yes, we are receiving a lot of requests. I cannot disclose, but of course, we are becoming really friendly with our customers so much that we never say no. We say: “Let us make some calculations,” and we offer them a timeframe and cost. Then, it is up to the customer to decide what to do.
Of course, we are a small company and we are building the brand from scratch even if we have 94 years of history from our heritage. As a carmaker, we are brand new and not in a conventional system.
There are a lot of special requests, and until 2022, we were telling our customers to wait, but after Pebble Beach, when we demonstrated B95, a product that we can build on top of our fantastic chassis, we opened the door for a few special projects in the future. Our customers are asking: “If I want more, what is your limit?” And basically, there is no limit. In the near future, you will probably see something.
dR: Going off that response, have you gotten requests to build a complete one-off project? Is that something we can expect?
I can say that 2024 will, again, be another fantastic year for Automobili Pininfarina because our boldness and our entrepreneurial spirit are going to show our customers something really unique and special. This is something I can say, and nobody in my company is going to kill me.