Ferrari, Maserati, and Now Aehra. Meet Italy’s First Fully Electric Supercar Startup.
3 min
Italy is known for supercars from companies such as Ferrari, Maserati, Lamborghini, and Pagani. Those companies are plugging in—or at least thinking about it—but Italy now has an upscale fully electric startup. Aehra, based in Milan, calls itself “a new global ultra-premium electric automotive brand.” It launched an SUV last December and, with a first showing at the Milano Monza Motor Show this month, a sedan—both riding on the same battery platform.
The cars are known simply as the Sedan and the SUV, and they will hit the market in 2026, with pre-orders starting next year. They look sensational and promise high performance, in part because the company’s chief design officer, Felipe Perini, came from Lamborghini, Audi, and Italdesign, and its chief engineer, Franco Cimatti, is ex-Ferrari and Lotus.
Aehra photo
The car shown in Milan will be virtually identical to the 2026 production model, Perini said in a statement.
“At Aehra, we do not believe in creating unrepresentative concept cars,” he said, citing “classic Italian design principles and the world of nature” as inspirations.
The Aehra vehicles will be priced between US$175,000 and US$197,000. They will use recyclable carbon-fiber composite for a lightweight structure. High-premium and luxury buyers are being targeted.
“When it comes to that segment, people are not ready for Chinese and American brands,” CEO and co-founder Hazim Nada told Reuters. “Europe is still the reference.”
The international success of Tesla may challenge that assumption, but there’s no question that people all over the world love Italian design. Aehra plans to sell to North America, Europe, China, and the Middle East.
Both the sedan and SUV will be very fast, with a top speed of 164 miles per hour. Each will have a range of an impressive 500 miles, courtesy of a 120-kilowatt-hour battery sourced from Austria’s Miba Battery Systems. The cars might be produced by a contract manufacturer somewhere in Europe, at least initially, Nada said. The company could also buy an existing plant or build a new one, he said.
The sedan sports four uplifting gullwing doors and is a striking cab-forward design, with the windshield extending over the front wheels, and no visible door handles. The limited overhangs imply a spacious cabin.
What can be seen of the interior is in conceptual images, with a rectangular steering wheel, a flat floor (common in EVs), a center console and a door-to-door display like Mercedes’ Hyperscreen. But there’s a major difference. Aehra’s screen can be extended upward when the vehicle is parked, “instantly transforming the [car] into a home theater or an office environment,” the company says. “With the screen fully extended, the occupants can relax and enjoy a movie or transform the interior into your personal office, ideal for video conferencing.”
The edges of the screen will function like exterior mirrors, relaying visual information from twin cameras. There’s also a second, oblong display mounted in the middle of the leather dashboard, controlling such functions as navigation, heating and cooling, and infotainment.
Aehra photo
The SUV, with an aerodynamic design that’s almost as sleek as the sedan, will be offered in four- and five-seat versions. It features a steeply raked front windshield, and a fastback rear roof. Like the sedan to some extent, it will accommodate home theater, meeting room, and lounge configurations. The carbon-fiber-framed seats will be in Italian hand-stitched leather, and “airline first-class comfort” is promised with accommodations for “four full-sized NBA players.” Rear seats can be reclined.
There’s much about the Aehra vehicles still to be revealed, including details on the powertrain. The only thing certain at this point is that both of the two initial models will be attractive.
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From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
Two coming 2027 models – the first of the “Neue Klasse” cars coming to the U.S. early next year – have been revealed.
