Pininfarina Cambiano is all the legendary Italian design house could muster for this year’s Geneva show. It’s not really a looker, is it. And it’s party piece – one door on the driver’s side and two on the passenger’s – have already been done by Hyundai, and Mazda before that. It does have some redeeming features though.

The drivetrain, for example. It’s a very sophisticated and rather interesting system, consisting of four 82 HP (60 kW) electric motors electric motors on each of the four wheels. To support these motors with enough go-juice, there is a small diesel engine that acts as a sort of generator to charge up the batteries as you go along.

Now, all these stuff make the car heavy. It weighs 1,700 kg in fact. But despite that Pininfarina says it can do o-100 km/h in 4.2 seconds and can reach a top speed of 275 Km/h.

The electric range is said to be 205 Km, which is brilliant. You get 800 km with the diesel generator’s tank topped up. It’s a plug-in system, which means you can also charge it up by hooking it up to a socket. In that case it takes the batteries 6 hours to become fully charged, or 52 minutes if you use the quick charger.

It’s all brilliant. But Pininfarina is first a design house and then an engineering firm. We were expecting to see something fancier than this.