This Is Italy's Fastest Ever Hypercar. Want To Guess What It's Powered By?

The artiste coachbuilder that shaped countless Ferraris, Lancias and Maseratis has flicked the switch on a car of its own: the all-electric, 1,900bhp Pininfarina Battista

- Jason Barlow

If you accept that automotive design is a legitimate art form – no question – then Battista “Pinin” Farina has contributed more to this branch of human endeavour than anyone else. He is the lodestar, the Picasso or Warhol. Even New York’s Museum Of Modern Art had to acknowledge his influence: There aren’t many cars in its permanent collection, but Farina’s Cisitalia 202 is one, a deceptively simple-looking little coupé that set the entire automotive industry on a new aesthetic path when it appeared in 1947. And this at a time when Italy was still picking its way through the rubble of war, its factories decimated.

Cisitalia would be a footnote were it not for Farina’s company, Carrozzeria Pininfarina, reimagining the body as a single volume, rather than a series of conjoined elements. Pre-war, other designers had been playing with this form and early forays into air-cheatingly streamlined bodies pointed the way (including Pininfarina, in 1937 with the Lancia Aprilia Aerodinamica). But the 202 was something else, its aluminium panels hand-beaten over a wooden buck to set the template – perfect proportions, propulsive volumes to generate a sense of speed, minimal decoration.

Pininfarina went on to be fêted by kings and presidents and from 1952, until very recently, clothed almost every single Ferrari, among numerous other Alfa Romeos, Lancias and Maseratis. The company now has tendrils that have taken it into furniture, bridges, buildings, trains and aerospace. But ironically, this great automotive couturier has never actually created a car of its own – until now. And the Pininfarina Battista is named in honour of the man who started it all.