Previously written off as relics, the great automotive houses of Turin may be on the brink of a rebirth
Think of Italian car designers and the names just trip off the tongue: Dante Giacosa, Giovanni Michelotti, Nuccio Bertone, Giorgetto Giugiaro, Walter de Silva… All had a hand in the cars we continue to drive today or those that influenced them, and all cut their teeth with the Italian coachbuilding specialists (carrozzeria), most of them based in Turin, the capital of Piedmont in northern Italy and the spiritual home of Italian mass-car production.
We used to pay tribute to these Italian firms once a year at the Turin motor show, an influential event where we enjoyed concept cars, the like of which we’d never seen, from a litany of the great carrozzeria: Pininfarina, Bertone, Scaglietti, Vignale, Zagato, Ghia and Italdesign Giugiaro.
But these days Turin is a ghostly image of its former importance – most of the carrozzeria have either gone to the wall or been bought by larger manufacturers that have little truck with a provincial show such as the one in Turin. It’s been a rise-and-fall rollercoaster for Italy’s design houses, but are we about to see a renaissance?
Italy overtakes France
There’s a bit of history to how Italy came to prominence in the first place. As Kevin Rice, Pininfarina’s distinguished design head, explains: “Specialist automotive coachbuilding started mainly in France, which led the early motor industry and had a long history in horse-drawn coachbuilding, which quickly moved into car design.”
Building on the early years, where cars were produced as rolling chassis then sent to a body builder, French names such as Pourtout, Jacques Saoutchik, Vanvooren, De Villars, Gabriel Voisin, Figoni and Falaschi, Franay and Henri Chapron produced cars of quite stunning beauty.
But France’s motor industry was diverse, with lots of small makers, and had been decimated during the Second World War. In the post-war world, the motor industry was moving into automated mass production and France was rapidly losing its place at the top table. The 1945 Plan Pons (named after Paul-Marie Pons, the deputy director of the mechanical and electrical industry, or DIME) favoured larger manufacturers at the expense of the small. Raw materials such as steel and aluminium were in short supply, exports were prioritised, stringent taxes were introduced on large-engined cars – and the French coachbuilding industry dwindled.
Italy was well placed to take up the role and was peculiarly qualified to do so. While most luxury car bodies were formed from aluminium or fabric over ash-wood frames, Italy had experience (through its aeronautical industry) of working with all-metal bodies, such as Touring of Milan’s “Superleggera” construction method of wrapping aluminium bodies around a frame formed of welded fine-steel tubes.
Italy was also rapidly introducing steel monocoque bodies for mass-market cars and Italian manufacturers would farm out their specialist, lower-volume coupé and cabriolet bodies to the coachbuilding industry. As a result, there was a lot of experience in dovetailing artisanal design and specialist construction with modern all-steel mass-production techniques.
Foreign influx
And so, the Italian design houses thrived, and in thriving and becoming talked about they ensured that foreign manufacturers beat a path to their doors: Ghia with Ford, Volvo and Chrysler; Pininfarina with just about everyone; Bertone with Volvo, Aston Martin and Mercedes; Touring with Aston Martin and BMW; and Zagato with Renault, Bristol and Jaguar.
In addition, all of them worked for Italian manufacturers as they operated a traditional system of patronage. Fiat, Maserati, Lancia and Alfa Romeo, along with Ferrari and Lamborghini, bundled out work to the styling firms.
“Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, there was always a new technical reason for design changes,” says Rice, “which would mean calling on the undoubted design skills of an Italian carrozzeria.”
That could be anything from more efficient cooling and slanted engines, which brought lower bonnet lines, or the greater sophistication of stamped metal bodies, which could hold tighter creases and bends and, in the 1980s, aerodynamics to improve economy.
The brand takes over
But it was BMW that Rice credits as spotting the importance of “brand” over tech. “It realised that to tool up for the new sectors of front-wheel drive, or 4x4s, would take it away from its traditional rear-driven saloon sector and the costs involved as a small manufacturer would leave it highly exposed – BMW needed to attract buyers with the emphasis on its brand.”
During the 1970s, only Ford and General Motors had fully autonomous design studios and almost never used external design houses, while the rest of the European car makers did. As Rice says: “People wanted the latest thing and the Italians had a knack of presenting the new in the most stylish way. It was the 1990s when ‘brand’ became important. No, make that crucial.”
Beginning of the end
This was a double-edged sword for the carrozzeria. On the one hand, everyone wanted great design; on the other, they wanted to do it themselves. Car makers rushed to create their own design studios and staff them with talented undergraduates from the growing design schools (in the UK at Coventry and the Royal College of Art in London).
The Italians had a knack of presenting the new in the most stylish way
“And once they had invested all those massive budgets and hired all those people,” says Rice, “they had to use those facilities. This was a time when there were no great technical gamechangers happening. It was all about ‘brand’, which was controlled by the big car manufacturers.”
Competitive advantage in these times came from reducing cost, with figures such as José Ignacio López who, at General Motors and then Volkswagen, forced down costs in procurement as well as production. Increasingly, outside suppliers were expected to fund the cost of design, tooling and building on their own, only recouping the money when the cars started to be delivered. It meant that only the largest suppliers were able to shoulder the cost – a daunting challenge for the Turin carrozzeria.
Touring had gone in 1966, but now all the Italian design houses were suffering. Peugeot and later Ferrari dropped their relationship with Pininfarina, and Bertone ceased trading in 2014.
Italian design had lost its cachet and part of the blame lay with the big boys.
Ghia – the Ford years
Ghia had been formed in 1916 in Turin by the eponymous Giacinto and his partner Giovanni Gariglio. Between the wars the company’s aluminium-bodied cars were the toast of the era: Alfa Romeo’s 6C 1500, for instance, or Fiat’s 508 Balilla. But the factory was heavily bombed in the Second World War. Rebuilding took its toll on Giacinto Ghia, who died in 1944, forcing its sale.
During the time of plenty, Ghia was a money-making machine, with repeat orders from Ford, Renault, Chrysler and Volvo. The famous firm passed from hand to hand and place to place, although to survive it required a ready supply of skilled workers and customers and, by the late 1960s, they weren’t so available. Finally, by 1970, Ghia’s then owner, the egregious Argentinian businessman Alejandro De Tomaso, sold it to Ford. Fellow famed design house Carrozzeria Alfredo Vignale also passed from De Tomaso into Ford’s hands.
Ford used the Ghia name to sprinkle a touch of glamour on its mass-market cars. In 2013, it announced a repurposing of the Vignale name as a top-of-the-range specification. As a Turin-based studio in the hands of talents such as Moray Callum, Vignale had produced stand-out designs such as the Lagonda Vignale so the move seemed deeply sad.
And what about Ghia? “Ghia is an abandoned brand,” said Martin Smith, Ford’s straight-talking former design director. “It used to be not much more than a trim level centred on old-fashioned values, with velour seats and lashings of wood. With Vignale we are hoping to attract a younger and more forward-looking customer.” Nine years on, Vignale is a top-model, heavily-loaded trim line – just as Ghia had been.
Do big companies soak the life out of the small stuff they buy? There’s an argument they do. Even Italdesign Giugiaro, the Turin-based super-design consultancy that came out of Giorgetto Giugiaro and Aldo Mantovani’s Studi Italiani Realizzazione Prototipi, is now wholly owned by various bits of the Volkswagen Group, which has long been its main client.
Still there, but hidden
What of the future for those extant design houses? Do we still covet Italian-designed cars like we do Ermenegildo Zegna or Brioni suits?
Well yes, it appears we do, although as Rice explains, it’s difficult to quantify. “Italian design hasn’t lost its significance,” he says, explaining that the developing world still values the skills: China, the Middle East and start-up companies. “They still value the carrozzeria; it’s just moved east,” he says, adding that that’s only part of the picture because secrecy stipulations in contracts prevent outside contractors, such as design houses, from mentioning the brands they are working with.
There’s also different work, with automotive Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) becoming key to a vehicle’s appeal and several carrozzeria are now specialising in this area.
“The significance of Italian design is probably greater than it’s ever been. It’s just much of it is hidden,” says Rice.
Bespoke cars for the rich
There’s another part of their under-the-radar activities that isn’t well publicised either, which is building short-run special cars for manufacturers and the supremely wealthy. “The giga-rich are in search of something really exclusive,” says Rice, “but we have to keep so much of it quiet.”
In 2006, Pininfarina built a one-off sports car called the “Ferrari P4/5 by Pininfarina” for film producer James Glickenhaus. It has also built a bespoke Ferrari for Eric Clapton, as well as supplying other super-rich clients who can’t be named.
Pininfarina also builds a short series of cars and one-offs when wealthy customers demand something really special. “They’re road-legal cars,” says Rice, “and they have to be built by us with levels of quality that are better than the original manufacturer’s own standards, which can be pretty tough.”
But building cars for the bored Great Gatsbys of this world is no substitute for a real job and it’s the adoption of electric drive (whether through batteries or hydrogen fuel cells) throughout the European industry that might provide an opportunity for Italian coachbuilding to once more flourish out in the open.
Electric cars: a possibility
Though many (including, predictably, Elon Musk) have tried to claim to have originated the idea of a “skateboard” chassis, which contains an electric car’s entire drivetrain, batteries, steering and suspension, credit should go to Christopher Borroni-Bird and Larry Burns at General Motors. I was at the 2002 Detroit Show when GM unveiled the sensational AUTOnomy concept, which was just such a creation.
At the time, I wrote that the configuration meant that the same basic skateboard platform could carry any number of bodies: saloon, MPV, SUV, coupé, cabriolet and so on. Thus, the skateboard would be an open invitation for any design company to relatively simply and cheaply come up with a range of very different looks for what amounts to the same car.
Rice says that while some of the great names of Italian design are already being asked to do some crystal-ball gazing into the skateboard era to come, there’s also a new generation of Italian design specialists in the manner of Californian start-ups, staffed with talented young designers from all over the world.
“The creative pool designing cars in Turin is now probably bigger than it was back in the 1950s and 1960s,” says Rice, “but you wouldn’t know it.”
As for Pininfarina, Rice says that the electrification of the automobile represents an enormous opportunity, especially to those who can actually build a car. “We’ve built 1.5 million cars over the years,” he says. “When you do that many, you learn to design very carefully and adopt a holistic way of working where design, production and engineering work really closely together. We’re not just stylists. We’re car makers in our own right.”
So, while there have been dark days, and for a lot of reasons we’re unlikely to see that absolute beauty of cars such as the Cisitalia 202 or Alfa Romeo 6C 2500 again, it sounds as though the death of the Italian coach-builders has been greatly overestimated.
