Forty years ago, designing and engineering automobiles in Turin for carmakers all over the world over meant everything except a novelty.
Right from early 1900, the capital of Italian-style automotive bodywork throbbed with fervor. Fervor focused around designing, engineering and building cars for the automotive industry key players.
The innovative formula created by Italdesign unfolded into an independent company that shapes its future on its own. A company offering services for the great industry, rippling outward from design and engineering to industrial development, validation and homologation without, however, entering into its own realm of manufacturing.
When Giorgetto Giugiaro, Designer, and Aldo Mantovani, Design Engineer, created Italdesign in February 1968, already taking shape at Pomigliano d’Arco was the manufacturing hub where their creative-thinking would crystallize into the first-time roll-out of a masterpiece, the Alfasud lineup.
And thus, a company created to master the challenges posed by a contract work project becomes a farsighted and innovative formula, as evergreen today as in the past.
Springing to life from forty years of “Italdesign formula” application are more than 200 models manufactured in more than 50 million exemplars.
Striking limelight in the first decade of operations was the Alfa Romeo Alfasud line-up, the Lotus Esprit, the first-generation VW Golf and the Scirocco, and the Maserati III (four-door).
Gaining breath of life from 1978 and 1988 was the Audi 80, the BMW M1, the first-generation Lancia Delta, the Fiat Panda and the Fiat Uno.
Seeing the dawn of day in the third decade was the Renault 19, the Subaru SVX, the Lexus GS300, the second-generation Seat Ibiza and the first-generation Fiat Punto.
From 1998 to this day, the Maserati 3200 Gt, the second-generation Seat Toledo, the Fiat Grande Punto and the Brilliance Zhonghua.
Many of those models, starting from the Alfasud to the Panda, the M1 to the Zhonghua, and the Fiat Sedici/Suzuki SX4 combination to the second-generation Fiat Croma have been designed as well as engineered by Italdesign.
However, the “Italdesign formula” is mindset for application with or without design: for models that, although designed directly by the respective carmakers, are industrialized by the Turin-based team.
Among these, the Mercury Merkur, the Ford Escort and the Capri Sedans, the Lancia Delta HPE, the Fiat Marea and the Fiat Siena, the second-generation of Mini lineup, the Citroën C3 Pluriel and the Renault Megane family three variants.
Italdesign does not mean merely automotive design and industrial development. Italdesign also means commercial vehicles, such as the Fiat Doblň, the Fiat Scudo and the Fiat Ducato, and industrial vehicles, such as the Daily line, the Eurocargo and the Eurostar rolled out by IVECO, the Scania T-Truck, the light buses for IVECO and Volvo, and the tractors for Hurlimann, Lamborghini and Same.
From wheel to rail, with projects for high-speed and long-distance trains in China, Finland, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, garnered by tram and subway trains in Barcelona, Copenhagen, Rome and Turin.
Step-by-step, the Italdesign formula was launched also toward new levels of achievement in other business realms, with more the 20 years spent on developing and interpreting technological concepts such as the Nikon cameras and the Merloni domestic appliances, stretching out to forge and cooperate in architecture projects and packaging solutions such as the San Bernardo mineral water bottle for the Nestlč Group.
Today, Italdesign enters into the next forty years of history utterly and firmly rooted in the Giugiaro family with Fabrizio flanking, as from 1990, his father Giorgetto in the creative-thinking tradition and with a management team guided by CEO Enzo Pacella.
From a management and proprietary standpoint, continuity has prevailed, whilst the services offering has been propelled by evolution in order to master the challenges posed by the market.
In the times of the Alfasud, also demanded from the services expert was seamless assembly line engineering, a competence later transferred directly to production line suppliers.
For many years now. Italdesign is called to partake in the trialing, validation and homologation process for a new model; something once jealously guarded by automakers since the dawn of time.
Today, the “Italdesign formula” also means front-office dialogue with those suppliers that will supply the production line, so as to assure that the project becomes truly a “turnkey” project for the carmaker.
Over the span of forty years, three mainstays have remained a constant; a services company must intermesh creative-thinking and design engineering, must be swifter and must be more appealing cost-wise.
In 1968, the words “simultaneous engineering”, “time-to-market” and “design-to-cost” had yet to be spoken, but Italdesign already put them into practice.
The only difference? The same passion as forty years before, but with forty-years of experience more. And hundreds of enthusiastic customers.
