Italian coachbuilding is dead: Tell Me I'm Wrong

Is it the end for Italian style?

We're here to report the sad death of the Italian sports car industry. Not the cars themselves, thank goodness, but the way they're made.

GranTurismo will, literally, be last of the line

It'll happen next year in all likelihood, when the last Maserati GranTurismo leaves the marque's Modena factory. This series of redbrick buildings on Viale Ciro Menotti is where Masers have been assembled since 1939 and where they still do it the old way. And by old way we mean they get someone else to do the bulk of it.

Makers like Ferrari, Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo have a long and rich history with the north Italian carrozzerie, or coachbuilders, with names like Vignale, Pininfarina and Bertone for ever associated with some of the most beautiful cars in the world. But no maker has a stronger connection with them than Maserati.

Getting a man in
The roll-call of coachbuilders who designed and often built the bodies for cars bearing the Trident badge is long. We saw it in their signatures prominent on cars within the stunning museum display at the Museo Enzo Ferrari recently. The Pininfarina 'F' (oddly close to the Facebook F) the Touring Superleggera wings, the futuristic 'by Michelotti' flourish. Maserati courted them all, and fittingly the brand is the last in the region to hang onto the old methods.

There's only one robot in the whole place

We were lucky enough to get to nose round the Modena factory and we could see it clearly: this is old-school manufacturing. Nothing is built here - in fact there's just one solitary robot, applying the glue to bond in the windscreen. The rest is assembly by hand.

As in the old days, those gorgeous GranTurismo and GranCabrio bodies are shipped in from Turin, but not before taking a 10-mile detour via Maranello to the Ferrari factory where they get painted. Ferrari of course also supplies the V8 engines, something that the engineering-savvy Maserati brothers would be shocked by, but they would have been entirely comfortable with the bodies arriving by lorry.

Clean sheet metal
"Up to a few models ago Maserati didn't have a coachbuilding factory," Lorenzo Ramaciotti, head of global design for Fiat and the man responsible for the stunning Alfieri concept, tells PistonHeads. The coachbuilders started out life as highly skilled panel beaters and Modena was famous for them. Local race addicts like the Maserati brothers, Enzo Ferrari and Vittorio Stanguellini turned to them to create slippery, lightweight racecar bodies from the 30s onward. At the forefront was Touring Superleggera, whose complex tube frames overlaid with thin alloy panels became the standard for racing bodies.

Pininfarina A6 GCS typical of early collaborations

While Maserati and co were busy building chassis and engines, it was the panel-beaters themselves who were responsible for the look of the cars so it was only natural they found themselves morphing into designers as well.

Turin, a couple hundred miles northeast of Modena, became the coachbuilder/designers heartland. The city was home to the likes of Vignale, Bertone, Italdesign, Pininfarina and Ghia and they expanded their customer base far beyond the Modena racers. In fact some turned car producers in their own right - fastening their own elegantly turned coupe or cabrio bodies onto a more prosaic chassis and drivetrain combination supplied by manufacturers not just in Italy, but all over the globe.

Local knowledge
The world swooned over cars like the Pininfarina-bodied Maserati A6 GCS/53 Berlinetta, but the real money was coming from making more accessible cars like the 1200-1600 Coupe and Cabriolet for Fiat in the late 50s, early 60s, a model line that Pininfarina made in their thousands. This continued until quite recently with cars like the Ford Focus CC, Alfa Romeo Brera, and Volvo C70 made by the company.

Pininfarina/Alfa link typical of mainstream efforts

But life for the coachbuilders is pretty grim now. Those who weren't snapped up by global makers (Vignale and Ghia went to Ford in the 70s, Giugiaro's ItalDesign was bought by VW in 2010) are struggling.

Earlier this year Bertone entered bankruptcy proceedings while the courts looked for a buyer. Judging by the dead phone numbers on the firm's website, that hasn't gone well.

Pininfarina meanwhile is now largely owned by its creditors and the most recent company report declared a financial loss for the design house for 2013. A body blow came last year when Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo revealed that the LaFerrari wasn't designed by Pininfarina, only the second production car from the firm not to be since 1951 (the Dino 308 GT4 was designed and built by Bertone).

4C bodies are finished at the Maser factory

Reality check
The reality is that the car makers can now do what they couldn't before: cost-effectively build low-volume on flexible production lines. "Having a cabrio or a special version built at a carrozzeria is an expensive exercise for OEMs, due to lack of scale economies, fixed costs, mark-up the coach builder etc," Matteo Fini, principle analyst at IHS Automotive, told PH.

Now even the luxury and sports brands like Maserati are making entire cars in-house. "Today the Quattroporte and Ghibli come out of a factory that has been vertically integrated from the stamped metal to the assembled vehicle at the completed end," says Ramaciotti. Less romantic for sure, but more precise and more cost effective.

He says it's "not decided" where the Alfieri 2+2 will be built from 2016, but given it's based on Ghibli parts it looks a dead cert to come out of the same Turin plant, rather than fill the space of the Modena factory left by the exit of the GranTurismo.

Newly ambitious Maserati last to ditch old ways

Maserati has a plan to sell 75,000 cars a year by 2018, up from around 14,000 last year. Those are a long way from the coachbuilt numbers of old and as if to say, we're not going back there again, the Turin factory in Grugliasco with all its robots and 'vertical integration' is actually Bertone's old plant that Maserati parent Fiat bought back in 2010. Nearby, Pininfarina's factory lies sadly empty after a highly ambitious attempt by its new owners to resurrect it by bringing back the DeTomaso brand failed.

The days of highly skilled craftsmen building bodies elsewhere is not entirely dead. In the same Modena plant but on a separate line we watched the Alfa Romeo 4C being assembled around the carbon fibre monocoque that starts out life in Nottingham (of all places) before being baked in southern Italy and being shipped up. Which is as expensive it as it sounds.

Life has definitely moved on from when Maserati's Modena factory was first built, as Giuseppe di Coste, product manager for the GranTurismo and our tour guide round the factory, laments. "This place was in the countryside in 1937 - now it's in the middle of town. It's very difficult to stay here."

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steviegunn

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