Pininfarina Battista: The Atelier Behind an Electric Hyper GT

A name that finally builds its own car

The car is named for a man. Battista "Pinin" Farina founded the design house that carries his name, and spent his career drawing cars for other manufacturers. The Battista — 1,900 PS and 2,340 Nm of torque from four electric motors, the most powerful production car ever built in Italy — is the first car his company built to sell under its own badge. Automobili Pininfarina priced it from €2.2 million plus local taxes and capped production at 150 cars.

Chief executive Per Svantesson described the car as the realisation of a dream that began with Farina's own ambition: to create a beautiful car bearing only the Pininfarina name. The engineering underneath is delivered as a system — four motors, one at each wheel, fed by a 120 kWh battery, good for 0–100 km/h in under two seconds and a simulated WLTP range of up to 500 kilometres. Figures like those can be engineered anywhere. What those buyers are actually purchasing happens in one specific place, and it cannot be scaled.

Fourteen zones, ten weeks

That place is Cambiano, in the Piemonte region, where the company converted a 2,300-square-metre space inside its design and engineering hub into a dedicated atelier. Production director Andrea Novello runs the floor; his grandfather worked in the same facility decades earlier, building special cars by hand, and Novello is plain that the techniques carried down are still in use — alongside mounting rigs and measurement systems his grandfather never saw.

Each Battista moves through fourteen production and quality zones over about ten weeks. The rolling chassis — carbon-fibre monocoque, T-shaped battery, electric powertrain — is checked in first. The primed body is then bonded to the monocoque and measured for two full days against tolerances recorded in a bay that has been used for special vehicles for twenty years. Nothing about that sequence is fast, and that is the point of it: the car is verified into existence zone by zone, rather than inspected at the end and corrected.

Paint is its own campaign

Paint alone takes three to four weeks for a multi-layer finish, each panel mounted on its own rig so colour matches perfectly, in a palette of 28 colours drawn from the Piemonte landscape. Only after paint does the car come together in earnest — 80 percent of assembly happens in two days, with the butterfly doors alone taking two days to fit on a tilting rig built for that single job. Ten craftspeople build each car, and the handwork totals more than 1,250 hours.

The five Battista Anniversario cars stretch every one of those numbers — up to 1,340 hours and eighteen weeks, because their paint is applied by hand.

Commissioned before it is built

Before any of that starts, the client comes to Cambiano. Beside the production floor sits a commissioning lounge where each owner works face-to-face with chief design officer Dave Amantea and the colour and materials team, choosing from a range the company counts at 13.9 quintillion exterior combinations and 128 million inside. Owners meet the team behind the car, tailor its design with them, and can watch their own car being built.

That sounds like a marketing number until you watch what it does to the build: no two cars follow the same material sequence, so the atelier is not repeating a product — it is solving a new one, 150 times, within the same fourteen zones. The atelier's discipline has to absorb the variation, because the variation is the product each owner ordered.

One driver signs off every car

At the end of the line every car is checked in a light tunnel, water-tested, aligned for a full day, and driven on a test route by the same single test driver — so that any difference between cars is the specification, never the verdict. The first production car followed exactly that path out of Cambiano: shown at a client test experience in Monaco, then sent on to North America for Monterey Car Week before handover to its customer.

The first cars built for U.S. clients left the atelier in October 2022: a bespoke Battista tailored by its West Coast collector-owner in collaboration with Amantea, followed by the first of the five Anniversario cars — all five of which had been sold to U.S. clients at their Monterey Car Week premiere in 2021. A production run of 150 cars, each one signed off by the same pair of hands on the same roads — that consistency is a deliberate choice, and it is the last piece of handwork in a process built out of it.

Photographs: Automobili Pininfarina · Automobili Pininfarina · Automobili Pininfarina