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.

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.

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

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.