Bertone and the electric car
10/13/2020
The very first automobile designed 250 years ago by Nicolas Cugnot was steam-powered. Successful driving tests with combustion engines were not carried out until the second half of the 19th century. The electric drive also dates back to this era. In Germany, the first 4-wheel electric car was constructed by Andreas Flocken in Coburg in 1888. This was just two years after Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler made headlines with their first motorized cars!
As the book "Bertone - Pioneers of Car Design " ( review ) reveals, this "design consultant to the automotive industry" created his first electric car, a small spider with innovative aerodynamic styling features, in 1992 - just 80 years after the company was founded. The electric motor of this concept study, named Blitz, was installed behind the seats and the rear wheels were driven by chains. The batteries were housed in the box-shaped side sills.
As early as 1956, Nuccio Bertone had built a single-seater streamliner for speed record runs together with "horsepower wizard" Carlo Abarth and successfully raced it in the 500, 750 and 1100 cc displacement classes.
Bertone built on this experience in 1994/95 with the ZER. The three letters stood for Zero Emission Record. The cigar-shaped, 420 cm long and 99 cm slim single-seater reached 303.977 km/h on the 12.6 km long high-speed circuit in Nardò in southern Italy and covered a distance of 465 km at an average speed of 120 km/h the following year. These records impressively demonstrated the dormant performance of the electric drive. In the meantime, however, battery technology has made considerable progress!
In 2005, Bertone launched an electric future study of a completely different caliber: A luxurious saloon of a completely new concept, namely with four glass sliding doors that swivel forwards or backwards and also included roof cut-outs. The 5-metre-long one-off, which was given the evocative name Villa, thus opened like a calyx and allowed four to five passengers to enter and exit the car in an upright position. Naturally, the interior was also highly futuristic, with a 23-inch monitor instead of a dashboard... a harbinger of today's concepts.
