Pininfarina designs an EV wall-box for the Battista

Battista supercar gets its a bespoke charging point that’s every bit as stylish as the car.

You’ve just picked up your stunning new Battista supercar, an electric flying wedge designed by none other than the geniuses at Pininfarina. You cruise, silently but swiftly, home and pull on to your immaculately coiffured driveway. You then go to plug your new electric dream machine in, to top up the batteries, and find that you’re presented with an ugly, grey box, stuck like some electric carbuncle, onto the side of your house. No, no — that will simply not do.

This is Pininfarina we’re talking about here, arguably the greatest of all the Italian carrozzeria design houses. For its dramatic Battista electric supercar, no mere plug-hole is going to do we need something a little more bespoke.

Thus we have this, an EV wallbox designed by Pininfarina, and painted to match the precise shade of your Battista. Developed in co-operation with EV charging experts Green Motion, the Residenza wallbox can charge at up to 22kW of AC power, which should be enough to charge up the 120kWh battery in the Battista in around six hours, providing as much as 500km of range.

The box comes with a smartphone app, which allows you to control charging remotely, and is also enabled for use with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, so you can just shout at your phone to switch on things.

To keep everything really tidy, the cable automatically retracts back into the box when you’re finished, so there are no ugly snakes of wire littering up your perfect driveway.

That’s not all. If you’re cruising in a ’tista, you don’t want to be caught fishing through all the pockets of your Gucci jeans looking for the right RFID card to hook up to a public charger. So, to make things easier, Pininfarina is also teaming up with public charging company Charge Point and will give free access to public charging at 115,000 charge points across the US and Europe, and another 133,000 points through co-operation agreements with other charging companies. Using a 180kW DC-charging system, owners will be able to charge their Battista from 20 per cent to 80 per cent in just 25 minutes.

And you won’t even need yet another card — the Battista’s keyfob contains an RFID chip, so you can use that to connect your car to the public charging points.

Automobili Pininfarina Chief Product and Engineering Officer Paolo Dellacha said: “Our clients will love the thrill of Battista’s extreme electrified performance, yet they also need to enjoy living with this advanced technology. For that reason we have ensured there are a comprehensive number of public charging points available to them, made possible through our collaboration with ChargePoint. At the same time, a large proportion of the Battista’s charging will be done at home and our exclusive wall box design provides owners with a bespoke solution, finished to their exact taste.”