On a nondescript industrial estate near the not-very-descript Italian town of San Giorgio
Canavese north of Turin, there is a shuttered factory unit where weeds grow tall behind
rusting security fences.
As such, it's just one example of Italy's long-running manufacturing decline, but anyone
passing who looks more closely will see the shapes of cars within the spreading vegetation,
and they are surprisingly modern ones.
A dozen or so Alfa Romeo Brera spiders sit sealed within the compound, some smashed and
cannibalized for parts, others looking almost new.
They were the last product of this factory, a former Pininfarina plant that was originally
opened to build Cadillac Allanté bodies; it was shuttered in 2011 when the Italian
company's contract-building division collapsed.
The plant isn't being revived, but Pininfarina's role as a builder of cars is entering a new
chapter.
While Pininfarina's fame came close to rivaling that of Italy's native automakers, it has
had faced tough times in recent years.
It was founded in 1930 by Battista "Pinin" Farina and—during his lifetime—became
the preeminent Italian carrozzeria, first by building bespoke car bodies for well-heeled
customers, then as a design house and engineering consultancy working on behalf of other automakers,
and latterly producing limited-run models itself.
The most famous deal was the one struck between Battista and Enzo Ferrari himself, under which,
from 1951 until 2013, Pininfarina designed all of Ferrari's production models except
the Bertone-created Dino 308GT4.
But the 2013 launch of the LaFerrari marked the beginning of a profound change for Pininfarina,
because that car was styled by Ferrari's new in-house design team.
Other automakers have followed the same path, bringing design in house and often having
multiple studios around the world that effectively compete with one another, squeezing out the
design houses.
Bertone closed in 2014, Italdesign Giugiaro has become a Lamborghini subsidiary, and Pininfarina's
client list has lost much of its luster; its most recent projects have been for Chinese
startup Hybrid Kinetic and Vietnam's VinFast.
There were few obvious synergies when India's Mahindra & Mahindra bought Pininfarina back
in 2015.
Mahindra is best known globally for the heavily evolved versions of the original Jeep that
it still produces.
The company owns other brands, including South Korea's Ssangyong and Peugeot motorcycles,
but it had little obvious need for a top-drawer design house or even for Pininfarina's parallel
engineering expertise.
But now we know what got the check signed, with the announcement that the Pininfarina
name will be used to launch a new luxury EV brand, Automobili Pininfarina.
The first of these new Pininfarina products was announced at the Rome Formula E race in
April, with the news that the PF0 hypercar is set to share core technology with the Rimac
C_Two.
But beyond that, we're told that the plan is to turn Pininfarina into a full luxury-model
range.
"We're trying to position this [brand] at the very top of the business," Anand
Mahindra, chairman of Mahindra & Mahindra, said in Rome.
"We are not creating a new brand.
We have acquired this because we have the humility to understand that you cannot build
this, it takes 90 years or more.
"If Mahindra said we are going to build a new car called the Maharaja and price it
at $2 million, I don't think my board would support me.
I'd be out of a job pretty quick, to be honest.
What we're doing is investing in something that exists, that already has cachet and history."
While Pininfarina has plenty of that, it has very little experience at selling cars in
its own right, although it did broker sales of the limited-to-six Ferrari Sergio.
"We don't know enough about this," Automobili Pininfarina CEO Michael Perschke admitted
in Rome, "but we have people on our board like Antony Sheriff, who ran McLaren, so we
will be tapping into all the advice we can get."
The PF0 will be joined by at least one other model by 2022, with Perschke confirming the
plan is to sell a range of cars rather than single sequential models.
There's no official confirmation on what will follow the PF0, but Perschke admitted
that one or more SUVs would be "an obvious direction" for the brand to take.
We know that both the Rimac C_Two and the Pininfarina PF0 are being developed around
all-wheel drive, but their central "backbone" battery pack is a less obvious technical solution
for a large, tall SUV, which could better accommodate a flat arrangement under the floor.
Regardless of whether Pininfarina turns elsewhere for help for future models, Anand Mahindra
said that the brand wants partnerships rather than just supplier deals.
"If you go to somebody who has been around for eons, it's unlikely you are going to
walk away with any intellectual property rights," he said.
But don't expect there to be any cheap Pininfarina-badged cars: "This is no criticism of Tesla, but
there is no Model 3 equivalent in the future for this brand."
Pininfarina will operate its design and engineering consultancy business alongside its new carmaking
subsidiary, raising the question of how willing other automakers will be to give work to a
company they might be competing against.
If the company is to add to its distinguished résumé, it will have to be persuasive.
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