Bruce Wayne is arguably the coolest bachelor in Gotham City, a smart guy whose family business, Wayne Enterprises, develops advanced civilian and military technology, some of which goes into the nighttime crime-fighting gear of Bruce’s deadly alter ego Batman, the Dark Knight. First appearing in the 1930s, Bruce Wayne was the original superhero, powered by advanced technology.
Warner Bros. owns DC Comics’ Batman franchise. Thanks to a century of film production, Warner Bros. also owns iconic characters and storylines that lend themselves to branded luxury items.
Warner Bros. Discover Global Consumer Products has partnered with Automobili Pininfarina to develop a series of four unique battery-electric hypercars that reflect the bon vivant lifestyle of Bruce Wayne and the cool, menacing Dark Knight aesthetic of Batman.
At Quail Lodge next week, Automobili Pininfarina will be offering one-off Batman and one-off Bruce Wayne-themed cars of both its first hypercar, the Battista, and its second car, the B95. The “B” stands for Barchetta, pronounced BAR-ketta, Italian for little boat, a nickname given to small, all-Italian roadsters that don’t have a convertible top. Channel your inner Bruce Wayne, lay down a few million, and you’ll be the sole owner.
Both Battista and B95 use variations of the four-motor battery-electric powertrain that the guys at Cambiano developed in collaboration with Mate Rimac, the most popular heir to Nikola Tesla’s electric throne.
The Battista and B95’s four electric motors – one for each wheel, two at the front and two at the rear – produce an astonishing instant torque of 2,000 Nm, equivalent to around 1,900 electric horsepower.
Paolo Dellachà, CEO and head of development at Automobili Pininfarina, refined the black box control system to put all the power on the road in a useful and controllable way and led the development of the carbon fiber backbone and suspension architecture.
Both cars can accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in under two seconds in the Furioso setting, which I experienced when the Battista was unveiled in the canyons above Malibu in 2022. From that experience, I know that a larger man like me can get by comfortably in both cars and that the chassis dynamics are stiff but well-tuned, thanks in large part to CEO Paolo Dellachà spending years honing his craft at Ferrari and Maserati.
Battista and Barchetta will appeal to those open to a world beyond pistons and turbochargers, those who welcome electric powertrains. Because their lithium-ion battery pack is sandwiched between upper and lower cooling systems, always keeping the cells in the optimal temperature range, Battista and Barchetta don’t need a dozen radiators with active vents and complex cooling channels, as is the case with many mega-horsepower piston-powered hypercars.
Battista revived the ancient beauty of Pininfarina’s moving sculptures, which he created for numerous automakers, including more than half a century as the preferred coachwork designer for Ferrari. Battista and the Barchetta possess the flowing, graceful curves that characterized Pininfarina’s sports cars of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, curves that are reminiscent of many of the female athletes we have seen at the Paris Olympics in recent weeks. Those first decades after World War II are considered by many to be the Golden Age of the sports car. But we currently live in a new, technology-infused Golden Age of high-performance and exotic sports cars, a new Belle Epoque of automotive design and engineering.
I still believe that every supercar collector needs at least one electric hypercar, if only as a benchmark for acceleration. Because, simply put, no piston-engined hypercar can hope to match the effortless, violent acceleration of a battery-electric hypercar.
For me, Battista and Barchetta are both so beautiful, so classically elegant, that they will prove to be a good investment for decades to come. Dave Amantea, who heads up Automobili Pininfarina’s design, has given both cars exterior shapes that are best described by that very old term from the 1960s: sexy. Amantea has rejected and abandoned the brutalist shapes that are unfortunately so commonplace today. Battista and Barchetta have the feminine curves that an Italian sports car should have. Think of those Italian sex bombs from the Golden Age of cinema: Claudia Cardinale, Sofia Loren and Gina Lollabrigida. Yes, those kind of curves.
Battista and Barchetta are a perfect fit for both Bruce Wayne and his glamorous approach to courting ballerinas and supermodels, as well as the Dark Knight’s deadly late-night action.