Audi currently owns Italdesign, a design and engineering company that was started by Giorgetto Giugiaro in the late 1960’s. Many amazing designs can it claim such as the Alfa Romeo Brera, Maserati Boomerang, Lamborghini Cala, Lexus GS, DeLorean DMC-12, Saab 9000, and even the Lotus Esprit. It’s one thing to design cars, yet another to sell them yourself. Italdesign is looking to embark on the latter.
Italdesign announced plans to create a new limited-edition supercar division called Italdesign Automobili Speciali. Its first model will be the car shown here, an aggressively styled coupe with the Audi R8’s V10 and a sub-3.2 second 0-60 mph time. Only five examples will be built with a starting price of $1.6 million.
“The development of the one-off was based on the know-how achieved in the designing of hundreds of cars in our 49-years history,” said Italdesign Chief Technical Officer, Antonio Casu. “To reach the timing target we applied the latest CAx and Simulation Technologies. Styling has been integrated since the very beginning with early engineering and production processes. All this allowed us to produce a state-of-the-art car in terms of performance and safety.”
The plan is for Italdesign Automobili Speciali to launch a new model every 18 to 24 months. Some will be “ultra-low volume” models with only 99 examples produced. Others will be “one-offs,” that aren’t technically one-offs by definition, but with production limited to nine units each, they’ll still be incredibly rare.
“Important for us was to run this project based on our development and production process for Ultra Low Series Cars,” said Massimo Martinotti, Head of Project Management and Business Development. With this and a precise milestone tracking we achieve an outstanding quality and a very short time to market. We think that we can set with this process as a benchmark that we are looking forward to repeating for all current or future OEM customers”.
The Geneva Motor Show will be the place where their first stand-alone model will be unveiled. I’ve been a fan of Guigiaro sine the Lotus Esprit and the Isuzu Impulse. Now we can see this design house give us stunning creations with Audi’s backing and under its own name.
Source: Italdesign Automobili Speciali
Are you excited for the Italdesign’s first super car?
