Pagani wants in on the electric hypercar party. Yes, the same Pagani that makes the Huayra plans to produce an electric hypercar for 2024, according to a report from Top Gear. A report from last year said Pagani was considering it, but the language used here is much more definitive.
Company founder Horacio Pagani said, “Our future project is a fully electric car in 2024.” That sounds a lot like a promise to us. Now we just have to wait five years to see if it’ll actually happen — that’s a lot of time for plans to change, though. The other factor is demand. Pagani himself said the demand for an electric Pagani is about zero currently. “None of our customers or dealers want to know about an electric car. They don’t want to know anything about it. They’re not interested. It’s a huge challenge for us, because no one is asking for it.”
Producing a car that has zero demand at the time of conception is either forward-thinking or foolhardy, but Paganis sell in such low numbers that it’s bound to find some takers. Pagani could be well behind other supercar manufacturers in electrification efforts five years from now, so setting the timeline now could be a helpful push. There’s also no fear that V12 Paganis will be going anywhere. Cars with those engines will continue to be built, with a Huayra successor on its way in 2021.
The next hurdle will be figuring out how to do it. Pagani doesn’t have any partners to supply the battery pack or electric motors, so all the groundwork is being laid out in-house. According to the report, Pagani is already two years deep in development. Engineering a fully electric vehicle for a small company like Pagani would be no small task. AMG provides tailored V12s as the Pagani powertrain, but Mercedes doesn’t have any electric vehicle technology to suit Pagani levels of performance at this time. Perhaps a bit of shopping around is in order — Rimac comes to mind as one of the leaders in electric supercar motoring.
Pagani claims the biggest hurdle to the Pagani electric hypercar is weight. All the others in this realm right now are far heavier than their gas engine counterparts. How Pagani will be able to make a gigantic battery pack lightweight isn’t clear, but he thinks this is instrumental to the car’s success. No electric car will ever match the sound of those bespoke AMG V12s, so that’s a compromise Pagani buyers will have to make if they ever go electric. The intentions are made clear by Horacio Pagani himself, but we’ll be following this over the next few years to see if Pagani actually pulls it off.
