Although every motor manufacturer worth its salt has its own internal design and styling studio these days, there is still a place for the independent style house as long as it can adapt to changing times.
For one of the oldest names in the automotive design area, Pininfarina, that means expanding its role, becoming more competitive, and providing an enhanced range of services.
"Everything has changed in the past 20 years," says Andrea Pininfarina, CEO of Pininfarina SpA. "In niche manufacturing, the flexibility, the cost parameters, and the production quality required is incomparable to what it was when I began working in the company. In engineering skills alone, we have to be at least equal to the largest manufacturer." Pininfarina works with manufacturers ranging from the most exotic, such as Ferrari, to the bread-and-butter such as Daewoo. One of the most recent designs for that latter is the new Nubira, shortly to be introduced in Ireland. Other key cooperations have been with Peugeot, Fiat, Austin/Morris (the A40 and 1100 are examples here), Ford and Jaguar.
Over the years there have been many other cars which are familiar to several generations of automotive aficionados - the great Ferrari Berlinettas, the Lancia Flaminia, the Peugeot 406 Coupe and the same brand's 205 Cabriolet and 306 Cabriolet, the Bentley Azure, and the original Jaguar XJs, to name but a few. And there are more recent commissions which may set their own place in the history of motoring.
"The development of the Ford StreetKa from its original concept was a special recent challenge," Andrea Pininfarina says. "We had a very short time to get it into the market. It was also technically challenging to transform a car like the Ka into a cabriolet, but we are happy with the result: the car is fun to drive, and we hope it will particularly attract the attention of young people." The company's longest-established relationship is with Alfa Romeo, for whom it produced the first 'Pininfarina' car - the AR 6-cylinder 1750 - right back in the formation days of the company in the 30s. A look around the Pininfarina car collection at its HQ in Cambiano, outside Turin, will show a large proportion to be for that maker, including copies of every Alfa Spider.
"The Spider has always been part of the Pininfarina process, going right back to the Giuletta Spider, of which 27,000 were built, and the Duetto. They all involved either design by us, or bodybuilding, or engineering development. Or even complete vehicle manufacturing, as we have been doing with the Spider since 2000." There was a time when it seemed that only Italian designers could come up with a car style as a thing of intrinsic beauty, but Andrea Pininfarina is of no doubt that such a time is long gone. So his company is surviving only because it knows that there is real competition to be faced. Its strategy is to become a complete service provider, being a support for creativity in design, for technical feasibility, for engineering development in niche products, and sometimes in the manufacture of these niche products.
"With some manufacturers, we work in competition to their own design studios on a concept, and sometimes we beat them. On others, we work in addition to the manufacturer's studio, in parallel, providing an external view to the management of the company, and we consider that to be a very interesting role for our company." Pininfarina is one of the few 'household' names in the design business, a brand in its own right. And Andrea Pininfarina knows how important it is to maintain its value.
"For any part of the automotive industry, the brand is a company's most important asset, particularly as cars are becoming more and more equal to each other. A company like ours, of more than 70 years of history, continues to pursue the highest standards of excellence of its services. We have the competitive advantage of a brand that is recognised, and that is something that we are continuously investing in, year by year, in order to keep at the top."