Pagani Scraps EV Plans In Favor Of More V12 Hypercars

Back in 2018, Pagani's founder Horacio Pagani announced that his company had begun preparing for the electric age. The following year, Pagani announced that its next project would be a fully electric car to arrive in 2024. At the time, Horacio said that his customers were not interested in such a thing and that this only added to the challenge. But by last year, his tune had changed somewhat, and he noted that his customers want "to feel emotions when driving; they don't care about pure performance." In fact, the charismatic founder of the niche automaker said that there were customers who didn't buy the Pagani Huayra because a manual gearbox was not offered.

Why are we telling you all this? For context, because Pagani has now officially ended the fact-finding mission we alluded to at the outset, concluding that nobody wants an electric Pagani.

Autocar spoke with Horacio Pagani at the recent Milan Monza show, where the man was only too happy to explain what the future holds for his company and why: "In 2018, I created a team working on fully electric cars," with these people tasked with finding out what it would take to build a good electric supercar and who would be interested in it. However, "in four years, we never found interest in the supercar market." By contrast, the upcoming combustion-powered C10 has already found buyers for the first 100 examples.

And even if there were interest in an electric Pagani, Horacio says that it's just not viable. "At the moment, 90% of energy is produced without renewables. It's silly to think that only a few supercars [in the world] with ICEs can have a negative impact on the climate when 90% of energy is produced in a bad way."

This line of reasoning holds up - even the European Union has conceded that niche automakers should not have to meet the same targets as mass producers and polluters.