The drive for electric supercars speeds up. Super-rich petrolheads will be able to go electric.

BUSINESS ELECTRIFICATION IS THE preoccupation of the car industry. At the pricier end of the market, once the preserve of Tesla, models are now available from Audi, Jaguar, Mercedes and Porsche. Drivers after a cheaper option also have more choice. Volkswagen has ambitious plans to electrify its cars and in 2019 launched the ID.3 hatchback, the first of a range of vehicles that will eventually sell in their millions. In 2020 electric cars that serve a far more rarefied market will also go on sale: wildly expensive hypercars with batteries that propel them at outrageous speeds. Manufacturers such as Ferrari (whose chairman sits on the board of The Economist’s parent company) and McLaren have ­embraced hybrid powertrains, which couple internal combustion and batteries, not for green reasons but because they can propel cars even faster than petrol engines alone. The hybrid SF90 Stradale, which goes on sale in 2020, will be Ferrari’s most powerful road car, with a top speed in excess of 210mph (340kph). But with a rumoured price of $500,000, it barely qualifies as a true hypercar, prices of which start in the millions. Several new entrants think the hyper-­rich will be willing to pay even bigger money for pure battery power. The most prominent new firms are taking oddly similar approaches. Each uses a recognisable name from yesteryear. The flying-swan emblem of Hispano Suiza, which last made limousines in the 1940s to rival Rolls-Royce, is back on a bonnet. Automobili Pininfarina revives the name of the firm that designed the bodywork for Ferrari’s most beautiful cars. Piëch Automotive, which hopes to trade on the name of a notoriously grumpy former boss of Volkswagen who died in 2019, seems a more hopeful appeal to nostalgic petrolheads. Other existing specialist carmakers are also entering what promises to be a lucrative business. Supercar firms are fantastically profitable, and the most profitable part of the supercar business is exclusive models made in small production runs for loyal customers. That’s why Lotus—a British firm now in the hands of Geely, a Chinese carmaker—plans to launch the Evija in 2020. Rimac, a Croatian firm partly owned by Porsche, is preparing to follow up its absurdly swift Concept One, of which it made eight examples, with the unimaginatively named but no less rapid Concept Two. The idea of making eye-wateringly expensive cars in very limited numbers to attract wealthy collectors is borrowed from the established supercar firms. In 2019 Ferrari unveiled two models, the Monza SP-1 and SP-2, inspired by racing cars from its past. Only 500 of each will be made, costing around $1.7m each. But the new carmakers have even more limited ambitions in terms of production, if not price. Pininfarina will make only 150 of its Battista and charge over $2m. Drivers of a Hispano Suiza Carmen are even less likely to meet another one. Just 19 examples will reside in the climate-controlled garages of sheikhs or oligarchs with $1.7m to spare. Rimac plans to make around 150 cars and Lotus is aiming for 130. Both hope to relieve customers of $2m a time. Existing supercar firms will not worry too much. All are contemplating pure electric cars of their own. And the sort of person who buys a $2m hypercar is a collector who will almost certainly already own several expensive cars. Adding a pure EV to the fleet will not make them less likely to buy another high-performance, low-volume hypercar from McLaren or Aston Martin. How many of these firms will survive? Small hypercar-makers packing internal-combustion engines have appeared and disappeared with alarming frequency in the past. Some, such as Pagani and Koenigsegg, are still going but the likes of Lotec, Cizeta-Moroder and Laraki have vanished. Without the capital and expertise of a big firm behind them, the future for some of the newcomers could be as silent as the cars they are making.