If you spend much time following the automotive industry, you’ve probably heard the name Piëch. Ferdinand Piëch was the man behind the massive Volkswagen conglomerate, and his son appears to be taking after him. The young Anton Piëch founded a Swiss company called Piëch Automotive in 2016, and it looks like we’ll be seeing some of the initial results at the Geneva Motor Show this year.
Renderings of a coupe have cropped up online, and it’s said to be called the Mark Zero. These renderings reportedly preview the car Piëch plans to show in Geneva this March. We can be pretty sure they’re legit after comparing these photos to an official teaser image on Piëch’s social media pages. Piëch has said this initial coupe is an electric car, and a report from Auto Express claims range will be just over 300 miles on the WLTP cycle. Performance aspirations or goals were not shared by Piëch, but like most expensive electric cars, it’s fair to predict that this car will offer enough speed to satisfy most.
We’ll be expecting to see Piëch’s modular chassis in Geneva that is supposed to underpin all of its cars. Apparently Piëch plans to produce a wide variety of vehicles including a sports car and SUV using this chassis we’ll learn about in Geneva. The battery pack in this car is said to use air cooling, rather than liquid cooling that tends to offer better performance in extreme temperatures. Piëch still claims that the car will offer a quick-to-charge battery pack, though. Curb weight is slated to fall at about 4,000 pounds for the two-door coupe.
More information on the platform and car should be available come Geneva, but another bold rumor is the platform’s ability to accommodate various powertrains ranging from gas engines to pure electric like this one. Even after Piëch debuts its car in the coming weeks, it’s expected to be a long wait for a production version to see the light of day. Set to be manufactured in Switzerland, we can’t be sure whether the vehicle will be sold in the U.S., either. Plenty of electric car startups end up treading water and burning cash, but this one has quite the name attached to it. The teaser renderings seen here look good in general, so we’ll see if Geneva catapults Piëch Automotive any further than its name has gotten it so far.
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