PININFARINA REVEALS ITS RADICAL ‘LUXURY UTILITY VEHICLE’ COMPLETE WITH GLASS DOME AND 1950S INSPIRATION

There are many advantages to unveiling high-end cars this week at Pebble Beach this week, where the average attendee will find the vehicles well within their means. And so it is with the venerable Italian coachbuilder-turned-automaker Pininfarina, founded by Battista “Pinin” Farina in 1930.

The PURA Vision design concept to be shown at Pebble was developed in-house at Pininfarina. Most onlookers would call it an SUV, or at least SUV-adjacent, but Pininfarina calls it a Luxury Utility Vehicle (e-LUV). The first design element to capture the eye is the glass dome that sees the door glass and windshield flowing uninterrupted into the roof. The side glass opens up in gullwing fashion but the doors stay put and open in “suicide” fashion, with the rear doors rear hinged to allow easy access to the back seat.

The PURA Vision looks like no other car, or at least no recent one. It sits high on huge 23-inch wheels, with slab sides and a low and aerodynamic “pillbox” upper body that recalls some chopped 1950s customs. And a 1950s design was an inspiration, the Lancia Florida I and II concepts of 1955 and 1957 respectively. The Florida I sedan also had suicide doors and no vertical roof support structure between the doors, known as a “B” pillar. Another inspiration, the gorgeous Pininfarina-designed 1953 Alfa Romeo 6C 3000 Superflow concept, had a similar glass dome roof and a futuristic look. There are very slim horizontal LED lights at the back that extend into the curved rear hatch. The interior is relatively simple, with controls on a console-mounted tablet.

Pininfarina’s Battista Edizione Nino Farina is a tribute to the founder’s race-winning nephew. Pininfarina photo

Dan Connell, the chief brand officer for Pininfarina, describes the car as “beautiful, but in an unexpected form.”

Currently, Pininfarina offers the Batista, a US$2.2 million electric supercar based on the ultra-fast Rimac Nevera, and in the process of developing the PURA Vision, the company “kept the Battista owners and other admirers of the brand close,” Connell says. “We had a private showing for them, and some were skeptical—but their minds were blown by what they saw.”

The company’s second production vehicle, code-named B95, is the first Pininfarina to reflect the PURA Vision design philosophy, Connell says. Details will be revealed during B95’s formal debut at the Quail: A Motorsports on Saturday. It’s sure to be a very exclusive car with a big price tag.

Pininfarina will also have the Battista Edizione Nino Farina on its stand at Pebble. First shown at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in England last July, it’s a special edition of the Battista presented as a tribute to the first Formula One World Champion, Nino Farina, who was Battista Farina’s nephew. Setting it apart are unique paint colors, special gold wheels, and body side graphics. An aluminium door plate celebrates the younger Farina’s racing wins. Only five of the high-end electric cars will be built. It’s the second limited-edition Battista, after the Anniversario model.

Simplicity is the watchword in the PURA Vision’s interior. Pininfarina photo

Pebble Beach is always a parade of new model reveals. The “House of Maserati” is celebrating the 75th anniversary of the GranTurismo (GT) model. Both the electric Folgore GT and the Trofeo versions, powered by a three-litre twin-turbo Nettuno V6, are to be sold in the U.S. Two one-of-a-kind GTs, the Luce and Prisma, will be on display at the Quail. Also seen will be the MC20-based Maserati MCXtrema, with 730 horsepower and a build of just 62 cars. Lotus will be giving rides in the 2024 Emira sports car, the final gas-powered Lotus with both four-cylinder and V6 power. Prices start at US$77,100. Rolls-Royce will show a one-of-a-kind car created for a customer.

Other cars to be shown at Pebble include: the Acura ZDX electric crossover, a “world-first new model” from Aston Martin, the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport Golden Era, the Hennessey Venom Revolution Roadster (with a 17-pound removable carbon fiber hardtop), the world premiere of the new Mercedes-AMG GT, the second Lamborghini electric concept, and the Infiniti QX Monograph Concept.

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

PININFARINA REVEALS ITS RADICAL ‘LUXURY UTILITY VEHICLE’ COMPLETE WITH GLASS DOME AND 1950S INSPIRATION

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.