Italdesign 01
As 50th birthday gifts go, Italdesign’s €1.5m Zerouno is a blinder
It’s not really 01, it’s Zerouno, capisce? The coachbuilding tradition is alive and well, building supercars
Even if you could draw a rear end as complicated as the one on the Zerouno, it would surely be impossible to manufacture. But Italdesign, 50 years old in 2018 with a back catalogue that makes it the Beatles of car design, has managed to do both. It’s not quite a Möbius strip, folding in on itself in a mathematically unorientable way, but it’s fantastically over-the-top.
It’s also fully functional, conceived to hustle fastmoving air into suckering the car to the ground and cooling hot componentry, but as this is one of just five ‘pieces’, it’s an abstract sculpture too. And the entire engine cover comes off, doubling as a superhero shield/ portable wing.
It really works, too. The road we’ve headed along takes us up above the clouds towards Moncenisio, about 50 miles west of Turin on the border with France. The SP212 is a corker, a new one on me despite numerous visits to the area, framed today by the most stunning palate of colours on the trees and wreathed in a sepulchral mist. It would be difficult to put a figure on this prototype Zerouno, but pretty soon its value and extraordinary rarity cease to bother me; this is an easy car to drive quickly, and there’s hardly anyone around, so we can, um, take some liberties. It dives into corners with magnificent precision, and rockets up the straights with a familiar-sounding bellow. Normally aspirated V10, you see.
Like many historic roads hereabouts, this one is punctuated at regular intervals by casa cantoniera, Pompeian red road-keeper’s houses long ago abandoned. Some Italian traditions apparently aren’t worth maintaining, but graffiti gives them a contemporary urgency and a renewed narrative.
Meanwhile, back in Moncalieri, the Turin suburb in which Italdesign was founded 50 years ago by Giorgetto Giugiaro and his business partner Aldo Mantovani, there’s tradition and evolution. Wholly owned by the VW group since 2015, the Zerouno is a mobile manifesto for Italdesign in a post-Giugiaro, and in some respects post-automobile, world. It’s the first in a planned series of Italdesign-branded automobili speciali, conceived and realised in just 14 months. If it looks like a low-volume, ultra-expensive supercar, then that’s because it is (€1.5m apiece, but all five are sold – the first off-plan when it was still just an idea). But there’s more to the Zerouno than that, as Italdesign’s Head of Design Filippo Perini explains.
“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 GTR50 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 wanted to do a limited-series car, to create a demonstrator”
Italdesign calls it ‘simultaneous engineering’, although in truth it picks up and accelerates Italy’s somewhat faded grand coachbuilding tradition – with honourable nods to Touring in Milan and Zagato, both of whom have kept the flag flying in difficult times. Italdesign, though, is operating at a level an order of magnitude higher; with 1,100 employees, this is no cottage industry. Although Volkswagen’s custodianship has protected it, it’s time to stretch out beyond that; 25 per cent of Italdesign’s business is outside the group, and the ambition is to go to 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.
Perini’s CV includes the Alfa Romeo Nuvola and 8C Competizione concept, with almost a decade as director of Centro Stile at Lamborghini after that, during which he oversaw the Aventador, arguably still the ultimate contemporary supercar. Unlike many in the ego-fuelled world of car design, Perini has never courted the limelight, and ran his Lambo squad like a family (with just 10 staff, many Italian families are actually bigger).
Now he has 120 designers at his command, and a remit that spans pretty much every aspect of product design. “Only in a place like this can you get the 360° view every designer needs to have,” he insists. “In Italdesign I find myself engaging with every area. In addition to the design team, there are more than 500 engineers here. After talking to you, I’m
meeting a deputation from South Korea. Frankly, I have no idea what they want to talk to us about. We could be discussing a chair. Or a helicopter.”
But cars are where it’s at… although the lines are becoming increasingly blurred. Complementary to the Zerouno, Italdesign is also developing the Pop.Up next with Audi and Airbus, a mobility system that takes us into what most futurologists think is the next realm: flying cars. Italdesign says it’s a “fully electric and zero-emission modular system, designed to help resolve traffic congestion in large urban areas”. Audi’s autonomous tech and electric powertrain underpins the car while Airbus is developing the detachable quadcopter drone that hoicks the passenger pod into the sky when the traffic grinds to a halt, but it’s an Italdesign project – possibly even a shiny mid-21st century successor to the ingenious and adorable Fiat Panda.
Perini reckons that the automobile as a proposition is poised to head down divergent paths: the Pop.Up Next will whisk CEOs around Blade Runner- esque cityscapes, while those same lucky individuals will want something that none of their Fortune 500 rivals have for a weekend tear-up, preferably analogue and bespoke, dripping in exposed carbon fibre and Alcantara. Enter the Zerouno.
For all that he decries the cult of personality, this thing is pure Perini: slashes, ducts, wings, diffuser, a riot of graphics and extraneous detail, although the lower half is apparently a slave to aerodynamics. The development team have put 24,000 miles on prototypes at Nardò and elsewhere, stress-
“The entire engine cover comes off, doubling as a superhero shield/portable wing”
testing the concept and ensuring the wild racecar venturi at the rear actually works. (Audi LMP1 driver and Le Mans winner Dindo Capello is part of the development crew.) The nose’s distinctive snout and ‘Ypsilon’ duct at the front aids air flow and promotes downforce, and although Perini preferred not to have a rear wing, the clients wanted it. The rear end’s artful aero origami includes an exposed section that reveals significant portions of 305/30 ZR Pirellis. (“We wanted it to be nude, like an old Le Mans car,” one of the Italdesign guys says.)
The fact is that cars like this are entertainments, and Perini agrees with a thesis Giugiaro put to me when I asked him recently why beauty in car design these days is unfashionable if not downright irrelevant: differentiation is what really matters. (How else can you excuse the current Toyota Prius?)
The Zerouno is based on the modular aluminium chassis that helped transform the perception of Audi as a sports car maker. The engine is the same as the naturally aspirated 5.2-litre V10 found in the R8 and the Lamborghini Huracán, the all-wheel-drive hardware is also identical, and the car’s also TUV-homologated. If necessity is the mother of invention, there are worse places to start, and Audi Sport is on side. Apart from its new superhero supercar outfit, can the Zerouno transcend its underpinnings and find its own character?
The prototype we’re driving has a jerry-rigged cabin, which is slightly distracting as we head for the hills. But the finished article is an impressive ode to the possibilities of carbon fibre, and the graphics on the main display are bespoke, yellow and blue to match the colours of Turin, down to a rendering of the exterior (this isn’t a cheap IT fix: Eric Clapton refused to accept his one-off Ferrari SP12 EC until the 458 Italia graphic had been changed).
But before we’ve even made it as far as the autostrada that’ll connect us with the SP212, it’s obvious that this thing is properly screwed together. Clearly, only a fool would jump into a car like this and immediately engage warp speed, but nothing about the Zerouno suggests it would dump you into the scenery if you did. In that respect, it’s akin to the R8 and Huracán: few supercars feel as approachable as these two.
But as well as sitting 40mm lower than the R8, there’s a more vigorous edge to its personality. The suspension and dampers have been reworked, so there’s an extra layer of aggression, and the Zerouno is more suffused in sensation even than its Lamborghini cousin. The seven-speed ’box changes gear with more snap, and the car turns in and changes direction beautifully. Italdesign hasn’t turned everything up to 11 exactly, but the Zerouno definitely rocks harder.
Five Duerta open versions are in the works right now. At some point in 2019, we’ll also see Zerodue, the configuration of which is currently being finalised. After that, there should be something new every 24 months or so. Italdesign waited 50 years to begin building cars under its own name, so there’s no time to waste.
“The Zerouno is more suffused in sensation even than its Lambo cousin”