Venturi (France, Monaco)

Venturi was a French-founded sports-car marque that later became a Monaco-based specialist in electric vehicles. Established in 1984 as MVS by engineer Claude Poiraud and designer Gérard Godfroy, it built mid-engined coupés and roadsters at Couëron using PRV V6 power and Renault transaxles. Under MVS (1986–2000) the line progressed from early Coupé and Transcup variants to the Atlantique series—the 260 (from 1991) and updated 300 (from 1996). Motorsport fed development via the one-make 400 Trophy (1992–1995), whose road-legal derivative, the 400 GT, adopted carbon-ceramic brakes as standard equipment. Venturi also contested endurance racing in the BPR Global GT Series and at Le Mans, and briefly lent its name to the Larrousse Formula One team in the early 1990s. After financial collapse in 2000, the marque was acquired by Monegasque entrepreneur Gildo Pallanca Pastor and moved to Monaco.

Under new ownership Venturi pivoted to battery-electric technology. The Fetish—designed by Sacha Lakic—was first shown in 2002 and sold in limited numbers from 2004; hand-built with a carbon-body and rear-mid-mounted electric powertrain, it was later updated and re-shown in 2010. The company pursued record-oriented “Global Challenges,” notably the Buckeye Bullet land-speed program on the Bonneville Salt Flats, and became an early entrant in the FIA Formula E Championship before divesting the team in 2020. Venturi acquired Voxan in 2010 to extend its electric expertise to motorcycles, and developed extreme-environment mobility projects such as the Antarctica tracked EV for polar research, while historical road-car production remained limited to a few hundred units built in 1987–2000.