It is quite common for a high-ranking businessman to celebrate a career milestone with the purchase of an exotic car, often a Ferrari. But to celebrate 50 years of working in the automotive industry, Giorgetto Giugiaro, 67, went a little further. He designed his own Ferrari, according to an Automotive News Europe report.
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The car, which debuts on Tuesday at the Tokyo auto show, is called the GG50.
Giugiaro’s initials, GG, are followed by the digit 50, reflecting that he began in car design in September 1955 at Fiat. Since then, Giugiaro has penned more than 150 production cars and about 100 concept cars. That makes him the most prolific car designer in automotive history.
The GG50 is a special project in another sense. For the first time, Giugiaro is the supplier and the customer of the same project. Although the GG50 is a personal car, it is not a futuristic concept, but a practical project, which could go into production as it is.
Ferrari chairman and CEO Luca Cordero di Montezemolo choose the model for the Giugiaro exercise: the 612 Scaglietti four-seat coupe. Montezemolo gave him only two restrictions: The car must fit the Ferrari brand image and it had to be shorter than the 612 Scaglietti.
Giugiaro started work in February 2005. He sketched entirely by hand – his lifelong practice – the 1/10 scale design. By April, after checking the look of the surface at Italdesign-Giugiaro’s virtual reality centre, a full-size plaster styling model was constructed. Creating a running prototype began in early June and was completed in early October, just in time to air-freight the GG50 to Tokyo for the show.
