Automobili Pininfarina taps heritage, yachts and sharks for Pura Vision
By Freddie Holmes2023-08-07T14:11:00
Car Design News chats to Dave Amantea, Chief Design Officer at Automobili Pininfarina, about the new Pura Vision show car
There has been a secret project going on in Cambiano, Italy and by all accounts it has been worth the wait. Believe it or not, but the Pura Vision has been in the works for quite some time – and arguably much longer than the usual show car. The project began back in late 2018 and in fact preceded the Battista hypercar which would go on to receive much fanfare in 2019.
The team says this is more than a concept car and is in fact a statement of intent that marks “a new chapter” for the company. We can certainly see that with the exterior, which straddles some kind of grey area between supercar, luxury shooting brake, SUV and… yacht? It is difficult to say exactly which category the Pura fits into, a complex Venn diagram of bodyshapes.
From chatting to chief design officer Dave Amantea, this perspective seems to hit the right notes. “We spoke about designing the car with what we call ‘unbalanced proportions’,” he explains. “We are inspired by Pininfarina’s successful design recipe of more than 90 years, so we started to create something that would embrace all the needs of all potential clients. It’s a new generation of product – a new animal.” By workshopping with colleagues, collectors and Battista owners, the vision for a four-seat, electric luxury utility vehicle (e-LUV) soon became clear. As Amantea puts it: “We really did our homework here.”
The design looked back at iconic heritage models in…