FIAT

The 1999 marks a significant anniversary: Fiat's Centenary. Within the remarkable role played by Fiat in Italy's economic and social life, Pininfarina would like to highlight its relationship with the Fiat Company, a relationship of such significance and importance that has had a profound effect upon the way the Pininfarina Company is today.

To celebrate the Fiat Centenary Pininfarina played an active part in the project organized by Italian Coachbuilders, displaying 70 of the cars that best represent the historic relationship with the Fiat Company on two of Turin's most beautiful squares, last July. Pininfarina also intended to pay homage to Fiat realizing Wish a research prototype built on the mechanical of the new Fiat Punto.
In the life of people and companies stories often intertwine to form a tightly woven fabric that is only strengthened by the passage of time and that shared work and mutual respect help to keep unaltered from generation to generation. That is the case of Fiat and Pininfarina, two companies united in their commitment to the car as esthetical object and industrial product, the result of creativity and technology.

The two companies have been travelling companions since the birth of the extraordinary means of mobility that has revolutionized the twentieth century which is about to end. "They have helped us a lot, and we too, by which I mean all of us coachbuilders, have represented a significant added value", says Sergio Pininfarina on the subject of the Fiat Centenary and the long way the two companies have gone side by side.

The little Company, set up in 1899 thanks to an act of faith towards the future by Giovanni Agnelli and a small group of pioneers, has developed into a significant international presence. For its part Pininfarina, which was established by Battista Farina, known as Pinin, in 1930 as a craftsman coachbuilder,has been transformed over the years into a diversified complex which stands at the cutting edge of design, technology, engineering and industrial production.

Therefore, for 69 years the blue Pininfarina "f" and the Fiat badge have been acting in enhancing the "Made in Italy". The Pininfarina's human and professional vicissitudes represent in the design world a story handed down from father to son, that has accompanied, sometimes anticipated, the social, economic and technological changes of our century. Fiat's evolution is a family story too, the Agnellis one, and it sums up the development and the production and commercial success of that very odd kind of carriage that needed no horses to pull it around: from the Turin of the Umberto time in the early 1900s to the Turin that stands today on the threshold of the New Millennium, car capital of Italy and main industrial center of the nation.

The relationship between Pininfarina and Fiat actually started long before the foundation in 1930 of Carrozzeria Anonima Pinin Farina. Born in 1893, Pinin started working as a boy in the Stabilimenti Farina owned by his brother Giovanni, who was called in to co-operate with Fiat by Senator Giovanni Agnelli himself. At a time when the Fiat Company was starting to take off, they were working on a new car, the Zero, that was vital to the Company's future and was to be the progenitor of all the utility cars.

That was in 1911 and the young Pinin (who was only 18 at the time) was already revealing his natural talent as a creative designer and engineer, his pronounced sense of balance and harmonious proportions. He was asked to design one part of the Zero, a component both technical and ornamental which was of enormous importance at the time: the radiator. He invented one with clean, simple lines that was taken with a dozen others to the Fiat factory on Corso Dante. There Pinin encountered the Senator, the usual stub of Tuscan cigar in his mouth, the usual mixture of Italian and Piedmontese dialect on his lips.

His was the final say on the choice of the most beautiful radiator. In the end only two radiators remained in contention, one created by Fiat itself, the other by Battista Farina. The Senator turned to him."Which would you choose?". And the boy, finding the courage to express his true feelings, replied: "I like this one best because I made it myself". The Senator glanced at him. And then he nodded. "Right, that's it then. Settled. Cerea (piedmontese expression meaning "Goodbye")".
Pinin tells that story in his memoirs, "Born With The Automobile". That probably was his first success also because the Zero radiator was followed by the Zero body and then by other commissions: he became head of the design and engineering team in the Stabilimenti Farina until he set up his own Company in 1930. "Ours was born as a craftsman factory", says Sergio Pininfarina today. "Set up with a capital of just 1,000,000 lire, it employed 90 people and produced just 42 cars in its first year.

Until the Forties, the Company only designed and built special bodies of a high esthetical and technical content, for individual clients or in small production runs. It was only in the Fifties that we began to develop an industrial structure and to move into the manufacture of low runs for automotive manufacturers in Italy and abroad".

More than 140 saloons, coupés, spiders, cabriolets and research prototypes have come out of the Fiat-Pininfarina co-operation that was born in the Thirties when Pininfarina began building one-off models or mini-series deriving from Fiat models for clients who wanted to stand out from the crowd.

That was the case of the Fiat 525 SS, a lively two-colour sports coupé dating from 1931 that marks the start of the relationship between Pinin's new Company and a Fiat model.
The examples of this happy marriage between the innovative creativity of Pininfarina and sturdy Fiat chassis have become part of Italy's automotive history. The numerous, innovatively elegant "greyhounds" built in the Thirties (noteworthy are the raked grilles, the faired headlights, the aerodynamic bodies) were followed in the late Forties by models like the Fiat 6C 1500 Cabriolet of 1947 with its monocoque body ("greyhound into bulldog" maintaining the same elegance) and the 1949 Fiat 1100 S Berlinetta Sport (Pininfarina's very first example of small production runs for Fiat).

In 1953 the 1100 TV Coupé, an elegant, perfectly balanced sports car, was displayed as a prototype at the Paris Motor Show. Later mass produced by Pinin Farina, the car was marketed in 1954-57 by a network of Fiat-approved independent dealers. In Pininfarina's own words: "That Coupé incorporated advanced technical solutions developed by my brother-in-law Renzo Carli. I myself took charge of the sales network and it was one of my first big jobs in the Company. Luciano Ciolfi won the Italian Touring Car Championship in an 1100 TV and Umberto Agnelli raced it several times as well". Also from the Fifties were the 1100/103 TV Break, the first modern example of the GT "Giardinettas Granturismo" which came out in 1955, and the 1200 Coupé and Sport Wagon of 1957.

1960 saw the relationship become even stronger and marked the start of a particularly fecund period of work together. In that period the 1200, 1500 and 1600 Cabriolet and Coupé made their debut: Pininfarina manufactured over 20,000 units of these models up to 1966. The 1500 Coupé was actually marketed directly by Pininfarina through its own sales network and some units were equipped with an OSCA engine and characterized by an air intake on the bonnet.
"These events", says Pininfarina, "show how good the Fiat people could be at getting it right. It was Vincenzo Bono, Fiat's General Manager at the time who asked us to make those cars: "You do the small scale production", he told us, "we will concentrate on the large scale output". You could call it an early form of today's outsourcing".

In 1963 at the Turin Motor Show a Coupé appeared that Sergio Pininfarina still gets emotional about (it was the 2300 Lausanne, "one of the most elegant models in our entire history but which sadly never made it into production"). On the other hand the two cars that made their debut at the Turin Show three years later had a particular success: the Fiat Dino Spider and the Fiat 124 Sport Spider.The first, built on a Fiat floorpan with a modified Ferrari 6-cylinder engine, previewed in the stubby tail these circular lights that were to typify the Ferrari cars of the Eighties. In its various evolutions, including the 1982 Spider Europa, the 124 was for Pininfarina a "big issue" model with over 200,000 units produced, of which 180,000 were sold in the USA. The Dino and the 124 were both mass produced in the Pininfarina factories. The Spider Europa was the first model to be manufactured and distributed, above all in the USA, with the Pininfarina badge on the bonnet.

Sergio Pininfarina has more to say about the Dino: "The Dino marked an important step in our relationship with Fiat. For us it was a major project that emerged from the talks then going on between Enzo Ferrari and Fiat which culminated in the well-known agreement between Ferrari and Fiat. In addition, my Father had just died and I had to prove I was up to the job entrusted to Pininfarina. We had agreed to build enough of them for Ferrari to race in the Formula 2 Championship under the terms of an agreement with Agnelli and we worked on it night and day, terrified that we might fail".

"Before I encountered him, as a captain of industry", continues Sergio Pininfarina, "I knew Agnelli as a motoring enthusiast. Infact we had built lots of cars for him, mostly Ferraris. But there were also two special Fiats.

In 1956 we built him a fun car with basket weave seats for his beach holidays: it was on a 600 Multipla frame and we called it Eden Rock. We exhibited it at the Paris Motor Show where Henry Ford fell in love with it at first sight and ordered one for himself. The second was the 130 Maremma Break we exhibited at the 1974 Geneva Motor Show".

The Coupé version of the 130, the outcome of Fiat-Pininfarina teamwork, is one of the most representative of Italian-produced cars. A derivative of the prestigious Fiat 130 with 6-cylinder engine, it won admiring attention at the 1971 Geneva Motor Show. It is a refined Coupé with the sleek, elegantly classic lines of its period and nearly 5,000 units were manufactured by Pininfarina.

A theory emerged in the Eighties that the only way to be industrially competitive was to manufacture a limited number of models in huge volumes, in particular on multipurpose saloons for every country. "At that time", says Pininfarina, "people thought that future would have been in world cars". Then everything changed in the Nineties, bringing a revived emphasis on niche models.

That was when Fiat decided it would go on co-operating with coachbuilders and designers for the esthetical and technical development of its new products, even in competition with its own Style Centres. "One of Paolo Cantarella's great merits", underlines Pininfarina, "is his passion for the product at every level and in all market segments". The partnership produced various designs and that's not all. More importantly a new and interesting relationship developed between Fiat and Pininfarina, a relationship represented by the Coupé previewed at the Bologna Motor Show in 1993.

"You might say", continues Sergio Pininfarina,"that this model marks our evolution into being the technological and industrial partners of Fiat. Besides the design of the interior, we also took charge of the entire project and mass produced the car in our own factory. For us it was yet another demonstration of Fiat's confidence".

It has to be said that Fiat's confidence in Pininfarina is a constant in the history of the two Companies. In Sergio Pininfarina's own words: "We owe our first international success to Fiat and this gave us a decisive boost. In the late Forties, George Mason, President of Nash, the future American Motors, wanted to make a small car for the American market. What we would call a city car today. So he turned to the firm he rightly considered an expert in this field, namely Fiat. So a Rambler was produced with a Fiat engine and that was when Vittorio Valletta mentioned my Father to Mason for future design collaborations.

They are really good at it in Pininfarina", Valletta assured him. That was how we came to design the Nash Healey Spider and Coupé and the Ambassador Saloon in the early Fifties, all of which were presented in the States with a great advertising campaign. And that made Pinin famous to the great American public as well".

Thinking back to the Fifties, it is worth remembering how the coachbuilding business was shaken when mass production got under way in Italy with the Fiat 600 in 1955 and by the engineering-manufacturing revolution that followed the introduction of the stress-bearing body. That seemed at the time to mark the end of the one-off models that individuals eager to own a really distinctive car used to commission from the expert coachbuilder. Many coachbuilders suffered this situation and actually did go out of business, but others were stimulated to move with industrial production that would have allowed them to successfully go on with their activity. "Although I was very young at the time", remembers Sergio Pininfarina, "I was already President of the Gruppo Carrozzieri ANFIA (Coachbuilders Group).

Our French and British colleagues went into decline while we Italians, or most of us, and in spite of considerable difficulties, managed to survive. That was partly because we were more innovative, partly because we were livelier. But we couldn't have done it without the help of Italian manufacturers like Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and Lancia, who trusted us to build limited edition models for them".

"In a way, what Fiat did was even more significant. Once there were no more chassis to 'dress up', Fiat decided to let us have floorpans that we could use to build on 'account of manufacture'.
In engineering and financial terms it was a very important decision.We built the cars and sold them and only later paid for the material supplied us with. And of course the deal wasn't confined to Pininfarina, but extended to all coachbuilders who were ANFIA members. It represented a huge opportunity for all of us. Essentially it meant that Fiat 'sponsorship' was allowing coachbuilders to make a major technical leap forward.

Those who exploited that opportunity correctly were able to combine pure design work with industrial activity, setting up, like us, engineering and research centres. Examples might include our Calculation and Design Centre and D.E.A. Centre (centre of three-dimensional measuring and drawing machines) set up in the late Sixties and our construction in 1972 of Italy's first 1:1 scale Wind Tunnel".

Another major event occurred during Pininfarina's period of industrial development. That was Fiat's decision to entrust Pininfarina with the production of its Campagnola, an off-road vehicle for civilian and military use that was manufactured between 1974 and 1979. "For the first time Fiat assigned us such a task and it was tremendously important to us as a stimulus to further expansion on the manufacturing side" comments Sergio Pininfarina.

However, the coachbuilders themselves - the term may be outdated but it still serves its purpose and Sergio Pininfarina insists on including in it the "purist" coachbuilders of the past, the coachbuilder-industrialists, the stylists, the designers, the metal craftsmen, the experts in new technologies - have all strongly, directly and indirectly supported Fiat's success. It is with pride and with respect that he proclaims: "We have all contributed to the image of the Italian car, able to be ahead of its time, full of creative solutions, innovative.

It may well be that without Fiat we should not have survived, but Fiat itself has benefited from the support of the Italian coachbuilders: in product and image terms. These days people talk about 'lengthening the chain of value' and it is fair to say that the creative and technological contribution of Italian designers has always represented significant added value. In the case of Pininfarina, in particular, Fiat gave us practical support in transforming ourselves into a service Company able to act in the automotive world both as a global partner for car makers and as a flexible supplier of expertise and specific services at every stage of the development of a new product from design to technological development and industrialization, and production".

In this 1999, celebrating the Fiat Centenary, the future looks more challenging than ever before for the motor car. Still, Sergio Pininfarina is convinced that the positive co-operation between Fiat and the Italian coachbuilders will continue to provide each other with valuable support, each helping the other to conduct design and engineering researches in a partnership that is bound to make the whole industry more competitive.

As they approach the new millennium both Fiat and Pininfarina are essentially committed to respecting a tradition constructed with work and passion. "Pininfarina? He's the Italian coachbuilder closest to our hearts", said Giovanni Agnelli recently on the occasion of the 1998 Trophée du Design assigned to Sergio Pininfarina by the French car monthly L’Automobile Magazine as the world’s leading coachbuilder.

"I know Sergio, I knew his Father, I know the younger generation. They're the best around and I'm not just saying that out of friendship, but because I truly believe it".