If there’s a company that knows what people want…
Horacio Pagani is perhaps one of the most enigmatic characters in the motoring industry. He speaks and understands several languages but communicates only in Italian and Spanish even though he understands English perfectly, he worked for Renault and Lamborghini before doing his own thing in 1991, though just a decade earlier, he was sweeping floors at the latter manufacturer’s facilities. Mr. Pagani’s fastidious attention to detail, demand of absolute perfection, and clear panache for engineering and aesthetic harmony has catapulted his company, Pagani Automobili, to heights unimaginable for a firm set up in the early 90s.
The Argentine was being interviewed by an Argentinian TV network called El Tres when he chose to reveal some of Pagani’s most interesting projects that are presently on the burner. There’s a full-electric Pagani in the works, which Mr. Pagani says there are some 20 staff members assigned to the project (for context, that’s about a third of Pagani’s employees). Don’t start screaming bloody murder just yet: Mr. Pagani says that he and his company will remain committed to internal combustion for as long as there’s demand for it. They’re just getting ahead of the EV supercar trend before it takes off at full chat.
Also mentioned in the interview was a successor to the Pagani Huayra, the company’s very smart, air-bending supercar that took the reigns from the Zonda back in 2011. Having been around for a while, Pagani aims to get a replacement model to market by 2025, and will not feature any form of electrification in its drivetrain. It’ll remain faithful to the Mercedes-AMG developed biturbo V12 engine that they already have, though it’ll be reworked thoroughly before it’s fitted into the new car.
When it arrives, the Huayra replacement will be offered as an ‘automatic’ (using the manually-operated automatic that the company is famed for) as well as a proper manual transmission, after strong customer demand necessitated the return of a full do-it-yourself box. Along with talking about the manual transmission, Mr. Pagani killed off any notion that his cars will feature autonomous driving capabilities in the future, saying that his cars are ‘toys’ that are driven by their owner when their owners want to drive.
Notably though is that the Huayra replacement and Pagani EV are both due to land at about the same time, around 2025. This will be the first time that Pagani Automobili will have two full models on sale concurrently, as the firm has previously stuck to only have one model (albeit with variations) available at any given time.
Stay tuned to CarShowroom for more updates as they come.
