Pininfarina Battista review

This is a ridiculous thing to ask given that you’ll be dropping around £2 million on the Battista, and that’s before you’ve been flown out to Pininfarina’s workshop in Cambiano to work through the exhaustive (and no doubt cripplingly expensive) options list. There are gazillions of different exterior and interior combinations to choose from, so be sure to wear comfy shoes.

Ask Pininfarina for their leasing deals and at best you’ll be met with a blank stare. At worst? We dread to think, but it’s not hard to imagine being removed from the premises very, very quickly. After all, the type of clientele attracted to the Battista will likely end the day by signing a seven-digit cheque in the same manner you or I might an obscure colleague’s leaving card. (‘Who’s leaving? Oh, um, let me find a pen…’) If you have more in common with the kind of person looking to consolidate their debts into one simple, monthly repayment, perhaps try a mortgage lender instead.

There’s better news on the charging front: Pininfarina has agreed a deal with ChargePoint, which has a network of more than 115,000 charging points across Europe and North America. You can use almost all of these for free for five years, at the end of which you could - with enough driving - break even.

How so? For argument’s sake, let’s pretend you’d otherwise be paying the 28 pence per kilowatt-hour stumped up by Tesla drivers using the Supercharger network here in the UK. For the Battista, that’s £33.60 per full charge, so… 59,524 full top-ups until you’ve made back the base price. Or given the car’s 310-mile range, 18,452,381 miles of driving.

The residual value might suffer with a figure this big on the odometer. And you’d probably need it serviced every other day. Not really worth it then.

Meanwhile, Pininfarina offers a home charging unit of its own, exquisite design, with colours to match the spec of your car. Whether or not this suits the spec of your house is another matter. It provides up to 22kW on an AC supply, enough to fill the Battista’s 120kWh battery in six hours. The leccy won’t be free though, and to make full use of the car’s 180kW charging potential (20 to 80% full takes 25 minutes) you’ll need to pop into a suitable service station.