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Italdesign Zerouno Review: €1.5million Supercar Tested

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A little bit of history first. Italdesign was founded 50 years ago by Giorgetto Giugiaro and his business partner Aldo Mantovani. Wholly owned by the VW group since 2015, the car you’re looking at here is the Zerouno, a mobile manifesto for Italdesign as it moves forward. It’s the first in a planned series of Italdesign-branded automobili speciali, and was conceived and realised in just 14 months. If it looks like a low-volume, ultra-expensive supercar, then that’s because it is (it costs €1.5m apiece, but all five are sold – the first off-plan when it was still just an idea).
Apart from when it set up a production line to build the BMW M1 back in the late 1970s (BMW co-developed that car with Lamborghini – back then Sant’Agata wasn’t the super-slick outfit it is these days, so much of the assembly work was sub-contracted to Italdesign and others.) We’ll let the company’s design boss, Filippo Perini, who headed up Centro Stile at Lamborghini and whose CV includes the gorgeous Alfa Romeo Nuvola and 8C Competizione concepts, explain. “We wanted to do a limited series car, to create a demonstrator of the capability we have in the company. The truth is, it’s not well enough known outside. We sold the five units at the price we set, and this attracted different OEMs beyond the VW group. The GT-R50 project with Nissan is an example. That happened because of the Zerouno: they saw that we could do it. It takes us back to the roots of carrozzeria: we can create the idea, but we also have the means to deliver for the potential client.” We’re all for it if it means more cars that look like this thing. That’s how it used to be in Italy, back in the day… Hand over a big bucket of lira and get a car no-one else had.
Italdesign calls it ‘simultaneous engineering’, but yes, it reprises Italy’s somewhat faded grand coachbuilding tradition (although both Touring of Milan and Zagato have managed to keep going, and regularly produce fantastic looking cars). Although VW’s custodianship has protected it, Italdesign’s CEO Jörg Astalosch now wants the company to stretch out beyond that; 25 per cent of its business is outside the group, and the ambition is to reach 50 per cent. China, inevitably, will help, but there’s plenty more where that came from. Including creating the design language for Vietnam’s first domestic – and David Beckham-endorsed – car company, Vinfast. Italdesign is also working with Audi and Airbus on a future mobility concept called the Pop.Up Next, an autonomous EV pod that hooks up with a drone to beat the traffic. A flying car, no less.
By: Jason Barlow, January 3, 2019
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