That Beginnings in Intercontinental Automotive Manufacturing — Gruppo Bertone in Malta.

The Italian based “Bertone” or formally named “Gruppo Bertone” has already established a highly skilled and exceptional influence on the automotive industry far far from its native country of origin of Italy. Bertone’s influence on a reliable of automotive extended over a complete different geographic and company automotive manufactures across the planet – whether if be Italian cars such as Alfa Romeo, Lamborghini, Fiat or European cars such as Mercedes Benz or the Swedish Volvo vehicles. To varying degrees there are family similarities in the designs throughout the mix. This will be expected. On one other side of the coin each Bertone design project is a unique creation from inception to fruition.

With the death of Giuseppe “Nuccio” Bertone in 1997, at the age of 82 a glorious amount of Italian car design came to an end. It can be stated that before the finish of the Second World War, and the time that followed in 1946, that Italian automotive design was plainly a regional event and nothing more. skid steer brush cutter Even if vehicle designs had been downright brilliant little was ever noted or noticed outside the immediate area and car community of Italy. The world looked to France for coachwork from 1919 to 1938, and might have continued to do this had Communist influenced governments following the war not punitively withheld raw materials from coachbuilders. Italy’s communists it seemed were more interested in jobs primarily. As a result, or as a direct initiative, they directly encouraged and nurtured a luxury car industry, in essence moving Italian automotive design to a middle stage.

It can be best stated that Bertone was among the first carozzerie (coachbuilders_ to move into “series” production, with the construction of 200 Bertone MGs for Wacky Arnolt of Chicago starting in 1952. These orders then directly resulted in the production of some 350 Arnolt-Bristols and put Bertone ready to manufacture a small series of coupes for Alfa Romeo, that has been then in big trouble with clients who’d been promised a fresh car , whose release had been delayed by body tooling. That product – the Giulietta Sprint created by Alfa’s Ferruccio Palamidessit, may be said to possess put Bertone on the map forever. Significantly more than 40,000 of the classic vehicles were produced before replacement by the Bertone-styled Giulia GT.

Nuccio Bertone wasn’t a custom himself, but he served first and foremost to find out, employ and guide some of the very best automotive designers known. An astute businessman, Bertone owned several anonymously titled companies in the Turin area .Thus consequently of splitting the work, and the pie across several enterprises and unconnected enterprises; he could persuade different automobile manufacturers throughout the board to let him produce automotive vehicles in series for them. Fiat 850 spiders and X-1/9s, Opel Cabriolets, Volvo coupes, and many others came from his factories. In addition his design center also created practical shapes for Japanese Mazda, French Citroen as well as Korean Daewoo among others. It could be stated that this was the start of the globally integrated car industry. The country of origin of an automotive product no longer was distinct and mattered so much. The vehicle could be designed in one single country, engineered in another and yet be manufactured in still another country and even be marketed from a different area. Where was the automobile made? Who knew? In the coming future the direct geographical origins of a vehicle could be even less evident and distinct.

Time proceeded and with impeccable taste Bertone continued to issue audacious show cars, including several Chevrolets, the astonishing Lancia Stratos Zero and the Alfa Romeo Carabo. The production Lancia Stratos and the Lamborghini Miura and Countach brought that audacity to the automotive marketplace.