Geneva show: Pinifarina goes it alone

ITALIAN styling house Pininfarina unveiled its first concept car for three years at the Geneva motor show last week, alongside the company’s latest designs in the Alfa Spider, Alfa Brera, Maserati GranTurismo S and Ford Focus Coupe-Cabriolet production cars.

The Pininfarina Sintesi is a fuel-cell car with four doors and four seats that was designed “to explore ideas and solutions for the car of the future”.

Individual fuel cells located at all four wheels deliver 20kW of power each, giving the vehicle a total of 80kW, but a rechargeable on-board battery provides a further 20kW to each wheel in ‘sport’ mode.

Pininfarina claims that acceleration from 0-100km/h takes only 7.5 seconds with the full 160kW on tap.

With a low aerodynamic drag factor of 0.27Cd, the vehicle has a top speed of some 248km/h, although the battery power would last less than five minutes under maximum load.

Sintesi is the first concept car produced under the direction of Pininfarina’s 33-year-old design director Lowie Vermeersch and is 4794mm long, 1988mm wide and 1298mm high, riding on a 2990mm wheelbase with front and rear tracks of 1726mm and 1676mm respectively.

Geneva was also a special show for former chairman Sergio Pininfarina – the son of company founder Battista Farina – as he was inducted into the European Automotive Hall of Fame.