Pagani Wants an Electric Hypercar But Battery Weight Is Holding It Back
Pagani has been working on an EV since 2018, but won’t make it official until battery tech is ready.
Pagani is one of the few automakers that's been quietly going about its business, keeping its head down, and making the cars its founder Horacio Pagani wants to make. Its latest creation, the Utopia, still uses an AMG-sourced V12, despite most supercar makers downsizing and hybridizing. However, that's not to say that Pagani is some tech-averse Luddite. In fact, the ultra-exclusive Italian hypercar maker has reportedly been working on an electric car since 2018. But according to Pagani, though, battery tech just isn't up to the brand's standards just yet.
Top Gear recently spoke to Christopher Pagani, Horacio's son, who said that Pagani will continue to work on an electric car but it has to be lightweight. And, at the moment, battery tech is just too heavy for the sort of car Pagani wants to make.
“You have to have a special feeling driving it, which sometimes you can call ‘fun’. You can call it 'pleasure'. But the weight is definitely our first question mark. So probably, nowadays with the existing technology, we cannot create the Pagani the way that we would like to do," he told Top Gear.
The shift to electrification isn't something Pagani is afraid of or even opposed to. In fact, Pagani said the brand relishes the challenge. “There are a lot of amazing things to innovate in an electric car—we're not afraid of innovation,” said Pagani. But for right now, internal combustion is the only way to make the sort of hypercars the Italians want to make.
Thankfully for Pagani, being a small automaker allows it to take its time with the electrification shift. Because of its small size and low volume, Pagani has until 2035 to make its switch to EVs, so it can hang until the technology is up to the brand's standards. Until then, Pagani will keep slowly developing an electric hypercar on the side, while it produces the weapons-grade, V12-powered hypercars it does best.
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