Italian Automaker Pininfarina’s Future Luxury SUV Will Likely Have Hybrid Power
3 min
Italian carmaker Automobili Pininfarina’s next production car, a luxury SUV based on the radical Pura Vision concept shown at the Pebble Beach concours event in California last year, will likely not be a battery EV, but is envisioned with plug-in hybrid power.
“We’re looking at all technologies,” CEO Paolo Dellachà tells Penta . “Our commitment to electric will stay—it’s the future—but we’re also investigating hybrid power.”
The CEO won’t yet comment on which internal-combustion engine might reside under the hood of the new SUV, but he says such a luxury car would ideally have up to 50 miles of EV-only range. “We want to maximise the range, but we also don’t want the battery to take up too much interior space or add too much weight,” he says.
Pininfarina Photo
The Pura Vision SUV could be toned down by the time it morphs into a production car, but in concept form, it displays a wide range of design innovation—and is as visually striking as the Tesla Cybertruck.
Dellachà has been in the lead role for a year and a half. But before that he was the company’s chief product and engineering officer, deeply involved in the building of the flagship Battista EV, and had previous appointments at Ferrari and Maserati. He is, in short, a very hands-on CEO.
Pininfarina Photo
The brief for the Battista, he says, was “to create the most powerful car ever built, with great handling that ensured it could do more than accelerate in a straight line. Reaching that goal was only possible with an electric powertrain—we showed what the Battista could do with four electric motors.” The US$2.2 million Battista supercar, featuring an electric powertrain developed with Croatia-based Rimac, achieved its brief—with up to 1,900 horsepower on tap.
There’s no date on the SUV yet, and Dellachà declines to comment on how many Battistas have been delivered, but the U.S. remains the company’s biggest market. And Pininfarina should be very visible during Monterey Car Week, with a rally planned that will feature at least 10 of the company’s Battistas (including all five of the special-edition Anniversario anniversary cars).
Pininfarina Photo
On Pininfarina’s stand at the Quail: A Motorsports Gathering on Aug. 16 will be the world debut of a concept for the one-of-a-kind Pininfarina B95 Gotham, one of four cars being built in collaboration with Warner Brothers Discovery Global Consumer Products’ Wayne Enterprises Experience, which develops curated luxury products. Warner Bros. works with DC Entertainment on Batman films, and Dellachà says the B95 Gotham is “something Bruce Wayne [Batman’s civilian persona] would want to have in his garage. It’s as if he were one of our clients asking us to build a unique project.”
The actual finished B95 Gotham, a variation on the open electric €4.4 million (about US$4.8 million) B95 Barchetta shown last year in an edition of 10, will be delivered to a customer by the end of 2025, Dellachà says. The other three cars in the Warner/Bruce Wayne series, all one-offs, are the Battista Gotham, the Battista Dark Knight, and the B95 Dark Knight.
Dellachà says that the creation of unique cars like the Batman-themed vehicles “will always be part of our business model.”
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In a series of social-media posts, the eldest child of David and Victoria Beckham threw stones at the image of a ‘perfect family’.
3 min
David Beckham was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday with Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan to promote their new partnership. But all anyone wanted to talk about was his son.
After the obligatory questions about business and the World Cup, a host on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” lobbed Beckham an out-of-left-field query about how young people can preserve their mental health in the age of social media.
“Children are allowed to make mistakes,” Beckham, 50, said. “That’s how they learn. So, that’s what I try to teach my kids, but you have to sometimes let them make those mistakes as well.”
Just a day earlier, his 26-year-old son Brooklyn Beckham had posted a series of accusations about his soccer-famous father and pop-star-turned-fashion-designer mother, Victoria Beckham.
He said that his parents had controlled him for years, lied about him to the press and sought to damage his relationship with his wife, Nicola Peltz Beckham. Their goal, he said, was to affect the image of a “perfect family.”
“My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else,” he wrote on Instagram. “Brand Beckham comes first.”
That brand has been burnished over decades of professional triumphs, tabloid scandals and slick dealmaking.
Recently, both David and Victoria Beckham put their legacies on-screen in docuseries that cast them as hardworking entrepreneurs and devoted parents. Their image appeared stronger than ever. Now their firstborn child is throwing stones.
Representatives for David Beckham, Victoria Beckham and Brooklyn Beckham did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for Nicola Peltz Beckham declined to comment.
In the U.K., the Beckhams are as close as you can get to royalty without sharing Windsor DNA. David is perhaps the most famous English player in soccer history, while Victoria parlayed her Spice Girls fame into a career as a respected fashion designer.
Their partnership was forged in the cauldron of 1990s celebrity gossip, with their every move—in their careers, their bumpy personal lives and their adventurous senses of personal style—subject to tabloid scrutiny.
“They were Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce before Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce,” said Elaine Lui, founder of the website Lainey Gossip.
Over time, the couple became savvy managers of their own brand, a sprawling modern empire including a professional soccer team, fashion and beauty lines, investment deals and commercial partnerships.
In recent years they each released a Netflix docuseries—“Beckham” in 2023, “Victoria Beckham” in 2025—featuring scenes from their private family life. (Brooklyn and Nicola appeared in David’s series, but not Victoria’s.)
“The way they’ve performed their celebrity has been togetherness,” Lui said: Appearing and engaging with the world as a happily married couple, in both relative calm and amid scandal. And as their family grew, their four children became smiling ambassadors for Brand Beckham, too.
Until Monday night. In a series of Instagram Story posts, Brooklyn accused his parents of “trying endlessly to ruin” his marriage to Nicola, an actress and model, and the daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz . Brooklyn declared, “I do not want to reconcile with my family.”
Where Victoria and David seemed to see press scrutiny as part of the job, Brooklyn and Nicola are operating in a manner more typical of their own generation. Brooklyn’s posts call to mind the “no contact” boundaries some children have enforced with their parents in recent years to much pop-psych chatter.
Andrew Friedman, managing director of crisis communications at Orchestra, said he’d advised many clients through family drama. “Going public,” he said, should be a “last resort.”
He’s also warned clients that using social media to air grievances opens a can of worms. “Nuance is not welcome in social-media feeding frenzies,” Friedman said. “Sensational and unusual details will overshadow the central issue.”
Brooklyn, the eldest of the Beckhams’ four children, has built a following in his parents’ image, though without the benefit (or burden) of a steady career.
He’s worked as a model, photographer, cooking-show host and most recently founded a hot-sauce brand. Brooklyn and Nicola went public with their relationship in 2020 and married in a lavish 2022 ceremony at her family estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
Rumors of a family feud flared almost immediately after the wedding, including whispers about the fact that Nicola didn’t wear a dress made by her fashion-designer mother-in-law.
Brooklyn on Monday recounted further grievances related to a mother-son dance and the seating chart. In the months and years that followed, celebrity journalists and fans closely tracked both generations of the family, looking for cracks in the relationship.
But official dispatches from Beckham World suggested that things were just fine. In a scene from the final episode of David’s Netflix series, the Beckham family, including Brooklyn and Nicola, joke around on a visit to their country home. It’s a picture of familial bliss.
“We’ve tried to give our children the most normal upbringing as possible. But you’ve got a dad that was England captain and a mom that was Posh Spice,” David says in voice-over.
“And they could be little s—s. And they’re not. And that’s why I say I’m so proud of my children, and I’m so in awe of my children, the way they’ve turned out.”
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