Pagani has acknowledged that it will not introduce an all-electric vehicle anytime in the near future, despite it spending the last 5 years developing an electric hypercar.
The Italian car manufacturer has never been one to shy away from innovation and in 2018, started to look into an electric-only model. However, during a recent interview with Top Gear, the son of company founder Horacio, Christopher Pagani, acknowledged that current vehicle batteries are too heavy to make such a car viable.
“Our goal is to create something that has to be lightweight. Looking at Pagani, what you see that is common with all the vehicles that we produce, they have to be lightweight,” he said. “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.”
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Interestingly, Christopher Pagani added that “there is no need for us to stop” its work on the viability of an electric hypercar, indicating that when the time is right, it could introduce an EV. That may not happen for a very long time given that small manufacturers like Pagani will be able to keep building internal combustion-powered cars at least until 2035 in Europe.
Horacio’s son went on to acknowledge that Pagani is evaluating the potential use of EV components from Mercedes.
“We are having constant meetings with Mercedes-Benz and AMG, and we are evaluating it,” he said. “They are our official partner at the moment so when we need [to build] a full electric car, we will take the final decision [then].”
Until this happens, Pagani remains committed to its AMG-sourced 6.0-liter twin-turbocharged V12.
“As far as how long we are going to have the V12? This really depends on how the regulations are going,” Christopher Pagani added. “We know that for small manufacturers we can have it at least until 2035. But we’re not afraid of approaching another powertrain in the future. We just have to know what the rules are.”
