Pagani New Utopia Is an Ode to Old-School Hypercars With a V-12 and Manual Transmission

Pagani ’s peers may be moving towards electrification, but the Italian marque has no intention of changing lanes anytime soon. The automaker unveiled its latest hypercar , the Utopia, on Monday. The company’s third distinct model isn’t equipped with an electrified powertrain.

Instead, it features the same kind of internal combustion engine that’s been in all the brand’s vehicles— a monstrously powerful V-12 . Pagani’s latest shares a name with Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia . The slim tome was the philosopher and statesman’s attempt to imagine an ideal world, where people lived together in peace and harmony.

The automotive Utopia is the boutique automaker’s founder Horacio Pagani ’s attempt to design and build the ideal hypercar. To that end, he surveyed some of his most valued customers to find out what they felt was missing from their vehicles. Three things kept coming up: “simplicity, lightness and pleasure of driving.

” Pagani And based on what we’ve seen so far, it seems like the brand was listening. The Utopia doesn’t look wildly dissimilar from its predecessors, the Zonda and Huayra , but it’s easily the brand’s most streamlined effort yet. It still looks like a futuristic racecar, with its bubble cockpit and giant fenders, but there’s a smoothness—and an attendant lack of ornamentation—that sets it apart.

These subtle changes result in a car that’s more elegant and aerodynamic than the brand’s past offerings. Butterfly doors open to reveal a cabin that is as bold as its lightweight carbon-fiber exterior. There’s a nice retro-futuristic feel to the space, with the brand opting for individual analog gauges and dials rather than a massive touchscreen infotainment display atop the center stack—though there is a digital display in the driver’s cockpit next to the speedometer.

The steering wheel has also been fashioned from a single aluminum block. Pagani Powering the Utopia is an AMG-sourced 6. 0-liter twin-turbocharged V-12.

The beastly mill can be mated to either a 7-speed manual or 7-speed automated manual transmission. Whichever gearbox you opt for, it’ll deliver 852 horses and 811 ft lbs of twist to the rear wheels. All that grunt rides on a set of striking alloy wheels—21 inches on the front axles, 22 inches on the rear—that have turbine vanes that help cool the brakes.

We don’t know what kind of numbers you’ll be able to put up in the car just yet, but the automaker says its powerplant is clean enough to meet even California’s stringent emission standards. The hypercar also features a monocoque chassis made from Carbo-Titanium, a unique mixture of composite and high-strength metal that was developed by Pagani, as well as front and rear subframes made from chrome alloy. It’s also equipped with a quad exhaust, a double-wishbone suspension and carbon ceramic brakes with six-piston calipers in the front and four-piston calipers in the back.

Pagani has done everything it can to reduce excess weight wherever possible, resulting in a car that tips the scales at just 2,822 pounds. Pagani plans to build just 99 examples of the Utopia. The automaker hasn’t announced a price or timetable for the vehicle, but Car and Driver reports that the entire production run is already spoken for.

We imagine at least a couple of those vehicles will end up on the auction block at some point in the not-so-distant future. Just be prepared to spend well into six figures for one. .