Month: August 2023

Enlarge / The Pininfarina Battista looks almost as good as it goes. And boy does this car go. (credit: Pininfarina)

There’s quick, and then there’s launching a car with such brutality that you can legitimately feel your cheeks pulling away from your face. It takes the Automobili Pininfarina Battista just 1.8 seconds to accelerate to 60 miles per hour. Yet somehow, that isn’t the most eye-popping detail about this hand-built Italian hypercar. Ditto its $2.5 million asking price.

A quick refresher: Automobili Pininfarina is a spin-off of legendary design house Pininfarina, a company responsible for making some of the automotive world’s most gorgeous cars (and also the VinFast VF8). The Battista—named for company founder Battista “Pinin” Farina—is Automobili Pininfarina’s first product, and it shares its electric underpinnings with the Nevera, a similarly hyperbolic supercar from Croatian brand Rimac.

Those EV guts consist of a T-shaped 120 kWh battery pack and four electric motors, one at each wheel. Max output is a yes-you-read-that-correctly 1,877 hp (1,400 kW) and 1,726 lb-ft (2,340 Nm) of torque, and while the aforementioned 1.8-second 0-to-60-mph sprint is ludicrous in its own right, even more impressive is that the Battista never lets up. It takes less than five seconds to hit 124 mph (200 km/h), and you’ll see 186 mph in just over 10 seconds. The Battista’s top speed? 217 mph (350 km/h). You’ll be there in no time.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bill Diodato)

The top 25 costliest drugs for Medicare Part D plans earned their lofty rankings largely through exorbitant price hikes—increases that, on average, more than tripled their list prices since they entered the market, according to a new analysis by AARP.

For nearly all the drugs, the price hikes far outstripped the rate of inflation, with increases ranging from 20 percent to 739 percent during the drugs' lifetimes on the market. Only one of the top 25 drugs—Trelegy Ellipta, an inhaler for asthma and chronic lung conditions—had price increases that were below the rate of inflation during its time on the market. Since its initial release in 2017, Trelegy Ellipta's price increased only 20 percent, compared with a general inflation rate of 23 percent.

Overall, the average lifetime price increase for the top 25 drugs was 226 percent. The highest increases were seen in drugs that have been on the market the longest. For example, drugs that were on the market for under 12 years had an average lifetime price increase of 58 percent, while those on the market for 20 or more years had an average lifetime increase of 592 percent.