The Tesla of Italy, Aehra’s Sexy EVs Now Have Names

ByAehra, the company that calls itself “Italy’s first pure EV brand,” has two uncommonly attractive vehicles in the works, the Impeto SUV and the Estasi sedan. The designs were first shown in 2022 and 2023 , then unnamed. Pricing for both vehicles is expected to be in the vicinity of US$170,000.

Aehra has some private resources, but is also awaiting government funding. It has submitted a €1.2 billion (US$1.3 billion) development plan to Italy’s Ministry of Industry (controller of the country’s Automotive Fund) to underwrite construction of a 200,000-square-metre plant, which it plans to build at Mosciano Sant’Angelo, in the Abruzzo region of eastern Italy. Aehra says it will create 540 jobs in the region, and 110 more at its headquarters in Milan.

The Estasi with its doors open
Courtesy of Aehra

Hazim Nada, Aehra’s U.S.-born but Italy-raised CEO and founder, tells Penta he expects the Automotive Fund to be capitalised with €2.5 billion next year.

“The government is quite enthusiastic about this project, and we don’t see anyone else with significant production plans,” he says, adding that automotive start-ups are thin on the ground “in Europe, not just in Italy.”

Nada says the company had originally planned to build its cars via an existing contract manufacturer such as Magna Steyr in Austria, but he says finding a plant that could handle the special carbon-fibre process Aehra plans to use proved difficult. “It’s been a busy year, focusing on the location for our assembly line,” he says. “I hope to move soon to working on consolidating our dealer network and sales process.”

The company likes Abruzzo because it’s not only the centre of Italy’s lightweight carbon-fibre industry, but also a hive of EV expertise at the University of L’Aquila. As its plans changed, Aehra has had to push back its start date. Nada says the company aims to be through the building-permit process by the end of the year or early 2025, then start construction of the plant—a 1.5- to two-year process.

A rendering of the Aehra Estasi interior.
Courtesy of Aehra

Cars should start issuing from the plant in 2027, Nada says. The plan is to eventually scale up to 50,000 vehicles annually. He says Aehra does not intend to produce anything but battery EVs.

“Our focus is to build cars you can’t create with a thermal engine,” he says. “That’s our core. We couldn’t achieve the same results with hybrids.”

The designer of the cars was Filippo Perini, a veteran of Audi and Lamborghini. The cars are certainly beautiful, and closely related in their very streamlined designs. Nada says “the platforms are identical below the beltline.” The vehicles have frameless upward-opening doors (the company calls them Dihedral Facing Doors) that leave a large opening and ease entry and exit. The target is for them to have a very low coefficient of drag, 0.21, which means they should slip easily through the air.

Aehra’s modified styling for its Impeto SUV.
Courtesy of Aehra.

The announced statistics are impressive, with a 500-mile range (close to certain versions of the Lucid Air) via 120-kilowatt-hour Miba Battery Systems packs and a top speed of around 165 miles per hour from the 800-horsepower powertrain. Zero to 62 miles per hour should take less than three seconds in the Estasi sedan, aided by a target curb weight of around 4,850 pounds (low for an EV with that size battery pack). A 10% to 80% fast charge should take 15 minutes.

Like the aforementioned Lucid, the Aehras are intended to be roomy inside. The SUV “will effortlessly accommodate four full-size National Basketball Association players while leaving room for a 6-foot adult in the middle of the rear-seat row,” the company says.

Aehra is targeting North America, Europe, and the Gulf States as markets for its cars. Nada thinks the Impeto SUV might have a sales edge.

“The SUV is easiest in the current market, but we expect to see some surprises with the sedan,” he says.

Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.

So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.

“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.

It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.

“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.

After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.

The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.

But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.

They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.

Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.

“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.

“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”

“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”

Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.

When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.

The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.

It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.

He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.

In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.

About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.

In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.

About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.

Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.

“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.

Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.

Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.

So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.

When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.

“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.

It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.

Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.

“The opposite of AI,” she said.

Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.

“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.

Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.

His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.

Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.

“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.

“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”

The Tesla of Italy, Aehra’s Sexy EVs Now Have Names

Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.