When he’s there he hangs out with a lot of farmers who, he says, perplex him with their fondness for Audi A4s. Many of you undoubtedly know of the many cars included in Giorgetto Giugiaro’s portfolio. It’s almost certainly too expensive to produce as a mass-market car, though it hasn’t yet been ruled out by Envision, and it can certainly be driven: there are two prototypes, Giugiaro currently uses one of them. He walks me around it, and the enthusiasm and the hands move into top gear. “Well, yes it is different,” he says. The Testudo launched the dramatic, low-slung sports car profile of the Sixties. He grabbed the attention with the Lotus Esprit prototype, the Maserati Boomerang, the Alfa Romeo Iguana. In 1972, his concept car for Maserati, the Boomerang, launched a whole new look for cars based on wedges and sharp, straight lines inspired by Japanese origami. I designed a car for this in 1992 [he did: the Biga concept car]. Even now, as you drive through the city and Moncalieri, it’s striking how often you find yourself passing, say, a huge Fiat plant, and the compounds of legendary companies like Pininfarina or Bertone. The engineers protested, but he reeled off more figures, and when they were checked, he was correct. He says he had to invent it partly because “after leaving Bertone and Ghia, I needed a distinctive style of my own, so people didn’t think I was using my employers’,” but it became popular throughout the entire industry because it was so efficient. He says he gets ideas riding trail bikes in the mountains around Garessio, the alpine village about an hour’s drive from Turin where he was born and raised, and where he and his wife spend most weekends. It’s easy to be dazzled by supercars but, if further proof were needed of Giugiaro’s supreme talent, look no further than Fiat’s back-to-basics baby: introduced in 1980, what at first appears to be a simple box on wheels is in fact graced with a flourish of clever minimalist details. Although the styling was more Ferrari than Aston in flavour, its taut … The Fiat Dino proved that Giugiaro was equally as adept at wonderfully understated subtlety as he was at delivering jaw-dropping drama with his supercars. Techrules Ren (2017): Designed by Giorgetto and Fabrizio Giugiaro . Launched in 1963, it was intended to be a coachbuilt special, but when Nuccio Bertone showed the car's shape to the Milanese bigwigs they were determined that it should go into volume production. Alas, despite such rumours, the arresting Jet remained a one-off. “I say, ‘What has an Audi A4 got to do with your work and lifestyle?’ And they say, ‘Nothing, but if I put on clean clothes and drive an A4 into town, people think I’m a doctor or a lawyer, not a farmer.’ This is men. Bizarrely, once its glamorous motor show career was over, the Tapiro was reputedly sold to a Spanish industrialist and subsequently burnt out when his employees set fire to it. (Inspired by the subject, he jumps up, takes out his trademark blue Staedtler mechanical pencil, and grabs a piece of paper to sketch the seal for me, which prompts his assistant to suggest using a different sheet because the one he’s drawing on is in fact his original archive sketch for the Mangusta. They painted frescoes and decorative paintwork on churches and palaces, and as a little kid in Garessio, Giugiaro hung around with them, watching. “Yes, quite a success in the end,” says Giorgetto Giugiaro, leaning forward on a deep, traditional white sofa in the offices of his architectural practice in Moncalieri, just south of Turin. Humans don’t change: a man will always want to show himself, he wants to spend his money, and show what he prefers by his choice of car. “Before those days,” Giugiaro recalls, “the engineers had really done the design, but now industrial was coming in and we’d give engineers ideas for solving problems, so then they could create new products and systems for us to create something with, and so it went on.”. Still, exaggerated performance figures or otherwise, the car had looks to die for and, by the time the model was retired in 1974, some 412 had found buyers. 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