The Pininfarina Battista can accelerate ‘faster than a Formula One car’

By now, you’re likely familiar with the Pininfarina Battista – a hyper-exclusive hypercar, wearing the moniker of a famous Italian coachbuilder, powered by a 1,874bhp EV drivetrain from the Croatian wonderkid at Rimac, pricey as a pair of houses and flirting with the limits of be-all, end-all pace. And if you weren’t familiar, then congratulations – you’re pretty much up to speed, metaphorically speaking.

But to speak a little more literally, you’re absolutely not. We’ll explain. 

Unless you’ve driven a Battista – or unless you are a fighter pilot or are genuinely Wile E. Coyote – you do not know what the transition from standstill to speed (and indeed back to standstill again) actually feels like. And that’s not an insult, either – most of the Top Gear office hasn’t either, thanks to that whole ‘hyper-exclusive’ thing, and the fact that it genuinely costs as much as two really nice houses. 

We can tell you the figures – zero to 60mph in 1.79 seconds, zero to 120mph in 4.49 – and we can explain that they’re apparently enough to claim the world records for production cars. We can even show you a video of a 0-200km/h run (all over in 4.75 seconds, netting another record), but not even a million tortured metaphors could convey what it feels like to... well, be conveyed at that sort of rate. 

Oh, and remember when we mentioned the transition from speed back to a standstill? Turns out Pininfarina’s got that one in the bag as well – 100km/h to zero takes just 31 metres. That’s the kind of distance a modern lightweight 911 GT3 manages, achieved in a two-tonne electric supercar. In fact, as far as we can tell, the only Italian supercar to stop faster did so at the start of The Italian Job. 

So the car is familiar and the speed itself is familiar, but the time it takes to go from one velocity to another? Well, as we’ve said, likely unfamiliar.