The Tesla of Italy, Aehra’s Sexy EVs Now Have Names
By Jim Motavalli
Thu, Aug 8, 2024 9:10am
3 min
3 min
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
By
Thu, Sep 3, 2026 5 min
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
