Another company has been formed with the hope of disrupting the premium EV segment with two models at first (an SUV and a sedan) that it plans to launch within the next 3 years. Aehra is a Milan, Italy-based electric vehicle startup with global ambitions (and a focus on the US, Europe, China and the Gulf states), whose creation was definitely spurred by the arrival of new and convincing brands such as Lucid, Nio and others.
Unlike many EV startups though, Aehra has so far mentioned no connection to China - it is not owned or run by a Chinese company, as is frequently the case among such new companies - and it looks like it not only wants to design and engineer its electric vehicles in Italy, but also build them in the country as well, with the hopes that they could reach customers around the year 2025.
Right now they don’t have anything to show - no design concepts or anything like that, since it’s a bit too early in the company’s history. However, Aehra insists that it is a serious outfit whose creation can already be traced back two years to 2020, when its two founders began assembling the team of specialists in the various fields needed for an automaker to function.
Now considering the narrative, that they want to make distinctly premium vehicles designed and possibly built in Italy, you can imagine they won’t be cheap. Aehra wants its vehicles to cost from around $160,000 to $180,000, and it plans to make quite a splash it says among established automakers operating in the segment (Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi, which will be given a run for their money the company says).
Aehra’s founders, Hazim Nada (pictured) and Sandro Andreotti, are confident in their new company’s success and they have hired Filippo Perini, former Italdesign, Lamborghini and Genesis designer to pen its future models. He’s already working on their design since both the sedan and the SUV are expected to be shown sometime this year in concept form. Perini said
Joining AEHRA represents an exciting challenge as we are really pushing the boundaries with aerodynamics, design and vehicle architecture as we develop our sedan and SUV models for delivery to customers in 2025. It is a delight to share the whole team’s passion for cars, this project and delivering sustainable mobility solutions for the future.
We don’t know what kind of performance level Aehra is aiming for with its vehicles and it doesn’t state it directly in its official blurbs. The company does mention that its vehicles will have “awe-inspiring” performance, but they stop short of providing actual numbers. To us that sounds like we should expect to see vehicles that could have around 1,000 horsepower, which seems to be the go-to number these days for vehicles in that price bracket.
When it comes to how all of this will be financed, a major talking point for any startup especially in these times of uncertainty, Aehra says it has “substantial private funding in place,” but it doesn’t say who is doing the backing or how much exactly it has to work with.
