Pininfarina: Mahindra turned the Ferrari designer into a $2.2M electric carmaker

Pininfarina spent nine decades designing other people's cars — Ferraris above all — since founder Battista 'Pinin' Farina opened the Turin carrozzeria. But a design house earns fees, not brand value, and the listed company struggled for years. In 2015 India's Mahindra Group bought Pininfarina for about $28 million, and in late 2018 it did what no owner had done: launched Automobili Pininfarina, a carmaker in its own right, based in Munich under CEO Michael Perschke.

The strategy was to enter at the absolute top. At the Geneva Motor Show in March 2019 the new brand revealed the Battista, named for the founder: a carbon-tub electric hypercar with four motors, 1,900 brake horsepower — then the most powerful road car ever — 0–62 mph in under two seconds and a 280-mile battery. Rather than develop a powertrain, Automobili Pininfarina bought one: Rimac supplied the battery and drive system, Pirelli the tires.

Only 150 would be built, priced around $2.2 million each and split evenly across North America, Europe and Asia, hand-assembled at Pininfarina's historic Cambiano atelier near Turin. Perschke's target was a complete sell-out by the Pebble Beach show that August. By July 2022 the Battista had entered series production in a dedicated 2,300-square-meter atelier at Cambiano, with worldwide deliveries beginning that summer.

150 Battistas at about $2.2M each — roughly $330M of target revenue — with the sell-out goal set within a year of the reveal and production running at Cambiano from 2022

Brand equity without a product decays: converting the design house's name into a carmaker captured value that contract styling never could.

Entering at $2.2 million made heritage the whole pitch — at that price the 90-year reputation is the product, and low volumes hide a small operation's inexperience.

Buying Rimac's battery and drivetrain skipped years of EV development and de-risked the engineering behind the halo claims.

Mahindra supplied capital and a fast-growing home market, while the Munich base and Cambiano atelier kept the brand credibly Italian-German luxury.

A famous name with no product can be refounded as a product company at the very top of the market: license the technology, hand-build in tiny numbers, and let heritage do the marketing.

The Battista went into series production at Cambiano in 2022 and deliveries started that summer, making the design house a manufacturer 92 years after its founding. The 150-car run gives Automobili Pininfarina a permanent halo — roughly $330 million of potential revenue from a single nameplate — and a platform for wider models, though the company remains a boutique in volume terms. The design business Mahindra bought in 2015 now anchors both sides of the company: it still styles other marques' cars and it lends its name to its own.