Italian Automaker Pininfarina’s Future Luxury SUV Will Likely Have Hybrid Power

Italian carmaker Automobili Pininfarina’s next production car, a luxury SUV based on the radical Pura Vision concept shown at the Pebble Beach concours event in California last year, will likely not be a battery EV, but is envisioned with plug-in hybrid power.

“We’re looking at all technologies,” CEO Paolo Dellachà tells Penta . “Our commitment to electric will stay—it’s the future—but we’re also investigating hybrid power.”

The CEO won’t yet comment on which internal-combustion engine might reside under the hood of the new SUV, but he says such a luxury car would ideally have up to 50 miles of EV-only range. “We want to maximise the range, but we also don’t want the battery to take up too much interior space or add too much weight,” he says.

Inside the B95 Gotham.
Pininfarina Photo

The Pura Vision SUV could be toned down by the time it morphs into a production car, but in concept form, it displays a wide range of design innovation—and is as visually striking as the Tesla Cybertruck.

Dellachà has been in the lead role for a year and a half. But before that he was the company’s chief product and engineering officer, deeply involved in the building of the flagship Battista EV, and had previous appointments at Ferrari and Maserati. He is, in short, a very hands-on CEO.

The B95 Gotham: Would Bruce Wayne buy one?
Pininfarina Photo

The brief for the Battista, he says, was “to create the most powerful car ever built, with great handling that ensured it could do more than accelerate in a straight line. Reaching that goal was only possible with an electric powertrain—we showed what the Battista could do with four electric motors.” The US$2.2 million Battista supercar, featuring an electric powertrain developed with Croatia-based Rimac, achieved its brief—with up to 1,900 horsepower on tap.

There’s no date on the SUV yet, and Dellachà declines to comment on how many Battistas have been delivered, but the U.S. remains the company’s biggest market. And Pininfarina should be very visible during Monterey Car Week, with a rally planned that will feature at least 10 of the company’s Battistas (including all five of the special-edition Anniversario anniversary cars).

The Pininfarina B95 Gotham (foreground) complemented by the Tumbler, a Batman movie car.
Pininfarina Photo

On Pininfarina’s stand at the Quail: A Motorsports Gathering on Aug. 16 will be the world debut of a concept for the one-of-a-kind Pininfarina B95 Gotham, one of four cars being built in collaboration with Warner Brothers Discovery Global Consumer Products’ Wayne Enterprises Experience, which develops curated luxury products. Warner Bros. works with DC Entertainment on Batman films, and Dellachà says the B95 Gotham is “something Bruce Wayne [Batman’s civilian persona] would want to have in his garage. It’s as if he were one of our clients asking us to build a unique project.”

The actual finished B95 Gotham, a variation on the open electric €4.4 million (about US$4.8 million) B95 Barchetta shown last year in an edition of 10, will be delivered to a customer by the end of 2025, Dellachà says. The other three cars in the Warner/Bruce Wayne series, all one-offs, are the Battista Gotham, the Battista Dark Knight, and the B95 Dark Knight.

Dellachà says that the creation of unique cars like the Batman-themed vehicles “will always be part of our business model.”

The Apple growth and profit machine is wavering, and the boost from price increases might not be enough to keep it going at historic rates. That dials up the pressure on Apple’s new chief executive, John Ternus.

The company saved the bad news for its earnings call, an hour after it posted its results for the September quarter, projecting that for the current quarter its high-margin services business will continue to slow and that its widely watched gross profit margin will continue to fall.

Apple AAPL -1.83%decrease; down pointing triangle shares had been flat in post-close trading but declined as much as 4% after the company made the projections, which fell short of Wall Street estimates.

The impact of high memory costs are weighing even more heavily on the company, Ternus and Apple Chief Financial Officer Kevan Parekh said on the company’s earnings call. Apple has stockpiled cheaper components purchased earlier, but those inventories are dwindling.

When Ternus took over as Apple’s third chief executive of the past 29 years on Sept. 1, he inherited sky-high expectations. The men he followed were among the most successful company leaders in American business history. Steve Jobs revolutionized consumer devices multiple times. Tim Cook expanded Jobs’s creation to spectacular heights.

The expectations are reflected in Apple’s huge valuation. Oppenheimer analyst Martin Yang noted that Apple stock trades at 36 times next year’s expected earnings, a premium to the overall market, even though its earnings are only expected to grow 1%, which is slower than its tech peers.

“We see insufficient upside to justify the premium,” Yang wrote in an investor note, adding that Apple needs to boost iPhone sales growth and turn around its slowing services business to make him more bullish.

Investors have bid up Apple shares because it has been a port in the AI storm—a reliable and capital-efficient business that stands apart from rivals which are spending hundreds of billions of dollars racing to the AI frontier.

While others invest in data centers, Apple has been pouring its own cash into buybacks and dividends. But that safety may be challenged if Ternus can’t speed up Apple’s innovation engine.

Apple’s lagging performance in AI was evident when its new “Siri AI” chatbot arrived this past quarter. Its long-maligned assistant was already stale the day it arrived, surpassed by agents such as Instinct and Muse that can complete multistep tasks for consumers, while Siri still sets kitchen timers.

Apple needs to give people reasons to buy its devices as they get more expensive. The company raised prices across the board last quarter to help offset higher costs. Without compelling new features, a big question is whether consumers will slow the frequency of iPhone upgrades.

The new iPhone Duo appears to be a bright spot. Consumers are scooping up the $1,999 foldable smartphone despite mixed reviews—so many that Apple can’t keep up with demand. Shipping dates jumped out to January soon after the device went on sale, a disappointment for the normally reliable Apple supply chain.

Apple said its revenue grew 12% in the September quarter, slightly ahead of Wall Street’s expectations. Its widely tracked gross profit margin, at 47.9%, also came in just ahead of analyst estimates.

Apple will need to find new growth avenues because a reliable engine during the Cook era—the services business—is slowing. Courts and regulators worldwide have limited Apple’s ability to charge developers big fees to distribute apps through its App Store, the biggest component of the company’s services segment.

One of its most lucrative App Store fee generators has been the ChatGPT app from OpenAI. Around the time Apple accused OpenAI of trade-secret theft this past summer, OpenAI began redirecting potential subscribers to pay via its website instead of the App Store, skirting Apple’s tollbooth.

Apple’s valuation has bumped up against a ceiling in recent weeks. Six times it traded above a $5 trillion market capitalization intraday before finally closing above the threshold, which it has already fallen back below.

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Italian Automaker Pininfarina’s Future Luxury SUV Will Likely Have Hybrid Power

Apple’s growth engine is showing signs of slowing, as rising costs, weaker services growth and AI competition challenge its profitability. With John Ternus taking the helm, the pressure is on to reignite innovation and sustain investor confidence.