Andrea Zagato, chief executive officer of the legendary Italian automotive design studio that bears his family name, leans on an old Alfa Romeo in the company headquarters on the outskirts of Milan.@calloalbanese
The problem with cars today is that they lack personality, at least according to Andrea Zagato, chief executive officer of the legendary Italian automotive design studio that bears his family name.
For 105 years, the company founded by his grandfather has conceived many of the most daring, influential and sought-after cars on behalf of brands including Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, BMW, Cadillac, Ferrari, Lancia, Maserati and more. Speaking to him, it’s clear he’s less than enamoured with the state of mainstream automotive design.
All hope for good design is not lost, however. If there’s a chance to bring some personality and emotion back into car design, Zagato thinks it could lie in the electric vehicle revolution.
Look down the street or across a parking lot full of compact crossovers and pumped-up pickup trucks and it’s easy to see what Zagato is talking about. Modern vehicles don’t look the same, exactly, but they do look similar, like variations of the same basic recipe. There’s limited space for creativity and daring designs.
The Alfa Romeo Giulia SWB Zagato, left, takes inspiration from the Alfa Romeo SZ of the early 1990s, another Zagato creation.Marco Zamponi - www.zamponi.net
“The trend is the systematic standardization of the components. Companies merge, and they make a big group, and the group shares all the platforms, and all the platforms are basically the same,” Zagato says.
Through its history, Zagato the company – formally ZED Milano SRL – hasn’t always made cars that are beautiful or easy to love, but every one of its designs oozes personality.
The company was founded by Ugo Zagato, Andrea’s grandfather, in 1919 as a coachbuilder. It designed and built one-off car bodies for individual clients and later did some low-volume production work on behalf of brands such as Alfa Romeo and Lancia. Unlike most of the other great Italian coachbuilders – namely Pininfarina and Bertone – Zagato has successfully stayed ahead of changes in the car industry and has not been purchased by a bigger company. It remains independent.
So many of the cars conceived by Zagato’s designers over the years have become highly collectible or influential. From the romantic 1957 Ferrari 250GTZ and 1967 Lancia Flaminia SuperSport, to the brutalist 1989 Alfa Romeo SZ and 1986 Aston Martin V8 Zagato, to the daring 2022 Alfa Romeo Giulia SWB Zagato and this year’s delightfully eccentric AGTZ Twin Tail, Zagato’s design work has remained proudly idiosyncratic in an industry hell-bent on homogeneity.
Some cars conceived by Zagato in the company headquarters on the outskirts of Milan.Supplied
Earlier this year, Zagato launched a Canadian outpost for its coach-building services – in which a small run of nine to 19 cars are completely redesigned with new bodywork – in partnership with Toronto’s Grand Touring Automobiles dealership. Zagato said his company could offer coach-built cars for less than $1-million, which is a relative bargain compared to the reported $35-million Beyoncé and Jay Z are rumoured to have paid for their coach-built Rolls-Royce Boat Tail.
Of course, it’s easy to offer idiosyncratic cars that ooze personality when you’re selling custom machines to a handful of wealthy clients. It’s much harder to do that on a mass-market level where each new car must appeal to millions of drivers around the world.
But, in Andrea Zagato’s opinion, the electric era opens up new opportunities for original, inventive designs for mainstream consumers.
“In this scenario [where EVs dominate the market], design is going to become the main differentiator,” he says. “If you cannot differentiate the car with the technology and mechanics – because electric motors, they are all the same – then the differentiation should come from the aesthetics.”
This year’s delightfully eccentric AGTZ Twin Tail.Supplied
The Zagato Mostro Barchetta.MAXSERRA
As car companies are discovering, it’s harder to distinguish one electric motor from another than it is to explain the obvious hierarchy of V6, V8 and V12 combustion engines. “It is possible that this change will push people to be a little bit more aggressive and to try to invent something new; design could be the key,” Zagato says.
As the boss of a company that offers car design services, he’s got skin in the game here, but he’s not wrong. He’s also not the first person in the car design field to note that the mechanical similarity of EVs could push automakers to emphasize design and user experience to differentiate their products. In a future where every EV has decent range, rapid acceleration and an interior stuffed with big screens, what’s left to set cars apart – except the way they look?
The second reason EVs could be good news for car designers, and indeed coachbuilders like Zagato, is because of how they’re made. Unlike modern unibody cars and crossovers – in which the vehicle’s rigidity comes from its entire metal body structure – some EVs are built more like body-on-frame trucks. Their structural rigidity comes primarily from a “skateboard,” a heavy rectangular battery pack with a wheel at each corner. The skateboard is then topped with a passenger compartment. (BMW’s ingenious i3 was built exactly this way.)
“Basically, with the heavy weight of the battery, the structural rigidity will be in the bottom of the car. So, it will give you much more freedom on the top,” Zagato says.
In some ways, it could be like a return to the early days of coachbuilding, he says. In the first half of the last century, firms like Zagato and Pininfarina made custom car bodies to sit atop a chassis from Bentley or Ferrari or whatever. In the not-too-distant future, perhaps we could be driving custom 3-D-printed cars that sit atop a standardized EV skateboard. At the very least, it would make parking lots a lot less boring; no more designs that appeal to the broadest cross-section of buyers.
Of course, whether or not car companies – many of which are struggling just to bring EV costs down – will ever be daring enough to take advantage of this newfound design freedom is up to them. We can only hope they’ll be keen to try out some new recipes.
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