Pininfarina announces an electric SUV concept coming this summer.
Italian design house turned automaker Pininfarina has been making a lot of noise about its silent Batista hypercar in recent months, but the company realizes it can't build its brand on a single halo model produced in strictly limited numbers.
The second model to be unveiled is a luxury electric SUV, which is set to debut in August 2020 as an experimental model. We have received preliminary information about it from the company's headquarters. We're not authorized to publish photos yet, but we can tell you a little bit about what we saw.
Pininfarina calls the PF1 project and the concept it represents "Pura Vision", but doesn't want to be associated with the term "SUV". Everyone at the company calls the high-riding model the Sustainable Luxury Utility Vehicle (SLUV), an acronym that evokes memories of the Isuzu-designed pickup truck that Chevrolet sold in the United States from 1972 to 1982 as an import vehicle.
Whatever you call it, the new Pininfarina model combines the ground clearance of a crossover with Grand Tourer-like proportions, with a long hood, steeply angled A-pillars and short overhangs. Luca Borgogno, Pininfarina's head of design, cites the award-winning Citaria 202, launched in 1947, as the main source of inspiration.
Cisitalia was closed down in 1963, and to this day no one has revived it. A deeper search down this little-known Italian rabbit hole leads to the one and only 1953 Alfa Romeo 6C 3000 Super Flow with a glass roof. Pininfarina adopted this solution for the Pura Vision, with the only sheet metal above the beltline being the windshield frame. The thin metal frame to which the panels are attached protects the occupants in the event of a rollover, so the company isn't worried about the SUV passing crash tests. [Davide Amantea, head of exterior design at Pininfarina, told me the Pura Vision concept is "very close to production": four-door, five-seat, developing up to 1,000 hp from an electric drivetrain. It uses a modular platform developed with suppliers and shares zero common parts with the Rivian R1T and R1S. Acceleration from zero to 60 mph takes three seconds, top speed is 186 mph, and range in the most powerful variant reaches 341 miles (on the WLTP cycle). It's too early to say whether a slower and cheaper PF1 variant will join the lineup, but CEO Michael Perschke has promised to release a more compact model on the modular PF1 platform in the medium term to partially offset the huge investment required for development. He promised to do so.
Pininfarina plans to unveil the Pura Vision concept on the sidelines of the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in 2020. Production will begin in 2022 at a new facility to be built on the outskirts of Turin, Italy, but the company cautions that it has not yet chosen a location, let alone purchased it or converted it to a production site.
The new luxury utility vehicle is expected to be priced at around 300,000 euros (approximately $330,000), putting it in direct competition with other vehicles. competition with them. Amantea has suggested that fewer than 10,000 units of the model will be produced.
-Prepared by Ronan Glon for Motor Authority
.
