Pininfarina Pininfarina’s striking design for an Alfa Romeo spider is among the concept cars that the carrozzeria design houses have prepared for the Geneva motor show.
These celebrated coachbuilders, which produce design studies and sometimes build small runs of vehicles under contract, have long been the gold standard of automotive aesthetics. Yet economic hardships and family tragedies in recent years have raised doubts about their survival.
The strongest statement of their determination to survive and evolve will be in the displays at the Geneva show, which opens for press previews on Tuesday and runs through March 14. Pininfarina, creator of many memorable Ferraris and Maseratis, will show a concept for an Alfa Romeo spider, as the Italians call a sporty convertible. This year is also Pininfarina’s 80th anniversary.
Bertone offers up an Alfa coupe of similar size called the Pandion, or sea hawk. Italdesign Giugiaro, the design firm that is a relative newcomer among the traditional carrozzerie, is expected to offer a third version of the car, a sedan.
The concepts were developed for Alfa Romeo’s centennial. Spreading the design duties among several studios echoes practices of the mid-1950s, when Bertone designed and produced the Alfa Romeo Giulietta coupe, called the Sprint, and Pininfarina created the Spider.
“Our Spider concept celebrates the historical shapes, but also lays out a design language for the future,” Lowie Vermeersch, design director of Pininfarina, said in a telephone interview. Paolo Pininfarina, the chairman, added, “Our achievement is not any single car, but the establishment of Pininfarina as a world reference for Italian style.”
In August 2008, Paolo Pininfarina’s brother, Andrea, who was then chairman, died in a traffic accident. Pininfarina has since reorganized. At Bertone, too, the death in 1997 of the founder, Nuccio Bertone, ushered in a period of family conflicts and business difficulties. Not until December 2009 did his wife, Lilli Bertone, who had been in conflict with the Bertone daughters, Barbara and Marie Jeanne, take control of the company. Bertone has a new executive design director, Michael Robinson.
But beyond their star cars, the carrozzerie have long depended on consulting work in design and engineering and limited production runs for large automakers. That is changing, Pininfarina’s chief executive and chief operating officer, Silvio Angori, said in a recent interview. “Contract vehicle manufacturing is vanishing because of the new level of flexibility at large companies.”
Pininfarina still produces the C70 convertible for Volvo, but new modes of manufacturing, Mr. Angori said, have increased the number of variants that established companies can afford to produce. Those companies he said, “in essence have become carrozzerie themselves.”
“Now Pininfarina is reinventing the world of carrozzeria,” he added. “Our future rests on design, meaning style and engineering services, on ecomobility and on our brand equity.”
Ecomobility is the company’s shorthand for green technology, notably its Bluecar electric project, a joint endeavor with Bolloré, a French industrial combine. Under Paolo, Pininfarina’s Extra division has designed consumer products like shoes, vending machines and even a hotel.
Mr. Angori said future growth would come from China, India and other emerging markets. Pininfarina was one of the first design consultants to the Chinese auto industry almost 20 years ago. “We have done work for Brilliance and Chery,” he said. “We showed a sedan concept for Tata.”
But now, Mr. Vermeersch said, Pininfarina will not just design individual models. “We will develop the whole design language, as we did in years past for companies like Peugeot,” he said.
The Alfa Romeo concept cars in Geneva are of more than usual interest because Sergio Marchionne, who heads Alfa’s parent company, the Fiat Group, recently suggested that Alfa might return to the American market as soon as 2012.
Other carrozzerie are showing signs of life, too. Touring Superleggera, whose tradition goes back to World War I, will show in Geneva a version of the Bentley Continental GT made into a shooting brake, a hatchback wagon intended ostensibly for hunting. The most ambitious Geneva plans are those of Italdesign, established in 1968 by Giorgetto Giugiaro. In addition to the Alfa, it is expected to show a car for Proton, the Malaysian automaker.
Pininfarina has been Ferrari’s de facto design studio since 1952, when Enzo Ferrari somewhat reluctantly decided to make road cars to finance his racing obsession. Ferrari’s recent hiring of a new design director, Flavio Manzoni, made some Ferrari fans wonder if the company might take more design work into its own studios. But Mr. Angori said the relationship with Pininfarina would continue.
The carrozzeria tradition will persist because it runs deeper than the auto industry. “The tradition here is devoted to creating beautiful shapes, going back to Da Vinci,” Mr. Vermeersch said.
“It is ingrained in the people and in their hands,” he said. “The hands come in when they work on the physical model. We have 40 modelers, and even in the time of the computer every inch of every car here is touched by the hand.”
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