New in town! There's something new in the centre of Zurich! All of a sudden, here it is, Piëch Automotive’s pop-up store. All set to invite everyone to come in and feel at home in its cool lounge atmosphere, to stop at the bar for a drink, and to see what there is to be discovered. And there it is, the beauty: The Piëch Mark Zero! Very sleek, very elegant, a touch of retro. An ingenious concept and trend-setting high-tech, all hidden beneath the silvery surface of this racy beauty. At the moment, it's just a concept. In 2022 it will finally be ready. But the store will only be open for a few months. So, what this means is: hurry – soon the magic will be over and the big wait will begin.
Right up until the starting shot in 2022, every week is fully planned out – a merciless schedule. At that point, company founders and friends Toni Piëch and Rea Stark want to be making the first deliveries of their all-electric debutante, Piëch Mark Zero. Further refinements and tests are lined up in order to turn the prototype into a true star on the road. The design is pitched to set your pulse racing – very flat and really wide. The classic lines are reminiscent of the heroes of the 1960s. The cut-off rear is unmistakably Piëch. The extremely innovative technical ideas, which are contained in the timeless steel body, have no need of a fashionably futuristic appearance in order to prove themselves. The Piëch knows what it can do: Power!
The Zurich-based car manufacturers have developed something very special for the architecture of the Piëch Mark Zero: a modular system, which makes it possible to offer a wide range of drive types – from electric, petrol and hybrid to hydrogen – all in a single model, and with the highest priority being given to the electric drive. Even hardware and software updates are easy to carry out with this system. And this is what the road has been waiting for: the clever distribution of the batteries along the transmission tunnel and the rear axle ensures a pure sports car feeling. Leading Chinese company Desten is providing the novel battery technology, which allows for extremely short charging times due to its low heat development, much to the delight of the impatient driver. A pure air cooled system is therefore sufficient and the weight of the car is kept below 1,800 kilograms («Ok road, here I come...!»). At home, the «refuelling» of the Piëch is supported by a charging station from market leader TGOOD – a storage technology that quickly «presses» its power into the car battery when it is connected. After less than five minutes, it’s ready to go again. With all this enthusiasm for innovation, the result is a vehicle that is both fun and powerful. It is lively, cheeky and no-frills. Just a Piëch with class that will delight its owner for a long time to come. Not least because of the luxurious interior design by Italian leather tailor Poltrona Frau.
Rea Stark After attending art school in St. Gallen and training as a typographer and lithographer, he worked as a designer in Japan for Panasonic, Sony and Canon, among others. He is the Creative Director of Piëch Automotive.
Toni Piëch A passion for all things automotive runs in the blood of this son of Ferdinand Piëch and Marlene Porsche. Having earned his degree in East Asian Studies, he left Princeton University for China, where he founded his own media agency.
