Exploring Italdesign - the Lamborghini design house

Lamborghini owns Italdesign nowadays, but you’d never know it as there is no sign of a Lamborghini presence here, let alone of Lambo’s parent Audi, apart from a few museum concepts.

Giugiaro sold 90% of his company – including his name and patents – to Audi in 2010. Audi put Italdesign under Lamborghini’s control before completing its purchase in 2015, when Giugiaro left and Italdesign’s focus was put onto group projects.

So successful was that plan, industry insiders began calling Italdesign ‘Audi’s design and technology arm’. Now, Italdesign is going through another change. Ex-VW finance man Jörg Astalosch took over as CEO in 2015 with a brief to make Italdesign a contributor to the group. His priorities for the company have been to get it back into engineering and design for outside clients, to set up an Italdesign academy to train young engineers and designers, and to build an Italdesign brand for low-volume, high-price supercars.

The biggest thrust right now is on the Geneva show-debuting Zerouno (‘01’) supercar, powered by Audi’s R8 V10. Penned by chief designer Filippo Perini – an interesting man who, during nine years at Lamborghini and thirteen at Alfa Romeo, used to be a client of Italdesign’s – the 01 will be in a very limited run of just five cars. The £1.3 million quoted for the Zerouno is a base price with a huge range of options taking it up to as much as £2m.

Despite that, cars like the Zerouno are surprisingly easy sells nowadays. Bay and Perini have a network of “20 or 30 friends” who will always be interested in them. The first Zerouno, the Geneva show car, has already been bought by an anonymous Belgian. Four Zerounos in total are spoken for. According to Italdesign director Franco Bay, “maybe one” is still available to the odd passing plutocrat. Italdesign has a rig for a driving game that allows would-be Zerouno owners to ‘drive’ the car long before they even see a prototype. A virtual reality theatre projects full-sized images onto a huge screen.

The complex appeal of cars like the Zerouno goes beyond the obvious one of rarity. There’s also the peerless quality and micro design refinements that come with bespoke car creation carried out by the industry’s top craftspeople. Buyers pay for the privilege of being able to discuss tiny details and then seeing them realised.

On the screen, we investigate some of those details: the two big clamshell carbonfibre body sections, the deep windscreen, the ‘stretched hexagon’ front air scoop, and an almost invisible slot that reduces front-end lift and smoothes roof airflow.

At the back, a big rear diffuser and heavily-louvred section in raw carbonfibre have the potential to deliver top-speed stability at top speed without the need for a rear wing, but owner preference has brought about a racing-style piece. Perini likes the NACA duct behind the roof that drags cooling air into the engine bay at speed while reversing the flow in traffic to extract hot air.

The big advantage of the Zerouno, according to Perini, is its weight, Undercutting rivals by about 150kg gives it a performance advantage without the need to tune the superb Audi unit, other than some tweaking of the exhaust. The detail and quality are reminiscent of the great old coachbuilding days. It’s all quite different to the normal showroom car vibe.

Italdesign is also working hard on its other two objectives. The academy is already running at full capacity, and the company is doing well in its efforts to pick up outside clients, especially on the engineering side. Franco Bay notes that the reputation of Giugiaro means that most still associate Italdesign with design work, but says that pure design projects account for “only about 15% of what we do… we do lots of behind-the-scenes engineering, we can deliver turnkey cars and can even handle low-volume production.

“We’ve done 200-per-year runs in recent years and we have capacity for up to 500 cars.”

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