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Thursday / 13 February 2025
HomeFeaturesThe man behind the VW Golf

The man behind the VW Golf

The legendary VW Golf would not be where it is today had it not been for the visionary that is Giorgetto Giugiaro.

Giugiaro is responsible for many of the world’s most legendary vehicles. Any of these ring a bell: 1963 Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GT, 1967 Maserati Ghibli, 1972 Lotus Esprit, 1978 BMW M1, 1979 Lancia Delta, 1981 DeLorean DMC-12, 1993 Bugatti EB112.

I’m sure you recognise at least one, if not more of Giugiaro’s most famous creations.

These icons were all penned by the man himself at his Turin-based automotive design company aptly named Italdesign and each one of them earned their place in the automotive history books for their breathtaking looks.

Where it all began

Giugiaro was born in Garessio, Italy in 1938 to a father who himself and his father were oil painters, which ended up being instrumental in the would-be legend’s future.

He spent his formative years in Garessio among his peers but already showed a fascination with the arts from an early age.

After he turned 14, young Giugiaro’s family moved an hour’s drive north from his hometown to Turin, where he enrolled in The Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti to study art and technical design.

He showed no particular zeal for the automotive world at first, that was until one of his professors suggested that the automobile industry would be willing to hand over an arm and a leg for his artistic aptitude.

Not being from the most affluent of backgrounds, Giugiaro heeded the advice and put pen to paper to create a few conceptual sketches, which he displayed at a student exhibition in 1955.

The particular showcase happened to be attended by Fiat’s Technical Director, Dante Giacosa, who admired the teenager’s talents and subsequently offered him a job.

Three months later, he found himself walking the halls of Fiat’s Special Vehicle Design Study Department in Mirafiori, where he spent the next four years honing his craft.

The swinging sixties

Giugiaro’s work eventually got the attention of the revered Nuccio Bertone of the famous Gruppo Bertone styling centre, who headhunted the prodigy in 1959 to work at his facility.

It was here where Giugiaro would start making a real name for himself.

Bertone poured all the resources available to him into the young artist and it paid high dividends, with his fingers being responsible for creating the silhouettes of the Aston Martin DB4 GT Jet Concept, Ferrari 250 GT Concept, Chevrolet Corvair Testudo Concept, Alfa Romeo Sprint, and the Fiat 850 Spider

During this period he also met and in time, married his wife, Maria Teresa Serra in 1963, and bore a son, Fabrizio, in 1965.

Six years under the guidance of Bertone proved plenty, with Giugiaro deciding to jump ship once again to coachbuilder Ghia, where he went on to work on esteemed cars from the likes of DeTomaso and Maserati.

1967 Maserati Ghibli, penned by Giugiaro

Two years later, now 29 years old, Giugiaro decided it was time to go into the wild on his own and he established the design studio Studi Italiani Realizzazione Prototipi with the help of Aldo Mantovani, which would become what we know today as Italdesign.

With 12 years of industry experience under his belt Giugiaro’s company quickly gained prominence, and by 1969, Italdesign could already count Abarth, Alfa Romeo, and Suzuki as its clients.

This brings us to the early ’70s, and the age of Giugiaro and Volkswagen.

Volkswagen contracted Giugiaro and Italdesign to come up with a successor to the Beetle, no easy feat since it was and still is one of the best-selling cars of all time.

He didn’t start out with the Golf, however. Two projects came before it, nameplates that, like the Golf, survived until the modern era.

These were the first Passat and Scirocco, which were both unveiled in 1973 to great fanfare.

Giugiaro sketching the first-generation Golf once again in 2021

An order then came from VW: “We want you to design us a successor to the Beetle. We are happy for the interior space to be roughly the same as that of the Beetle.”

Immediately, the craftsman got to work, and in March 1974, VW took the covers off the first-generation Golf in front of the entire world.

It was an instant hit, selling a massive 6.9 million units in its nine years on the market. To date, seven generations have followed the original Golf, each one a major success in its own right.

After the achievements of the Passat, Golf, and Scirocco, Giugiaro went on to work on a number of other vehicles both niche and widely recognised.

Thanks to Giugiaro, we now have eight generations of the VW Golf

Designer of the century

If by some miracle you were still not convinced that Giugiaro and Italdesign were all they were cracked up to be, this might do so.

In 1999, a panel of over 120 automotive journalists from around the globe agreed that Giugiaro was the designer of the century, one of the highest honours that could be bestowed upon someone in this field.

Come 2002, he was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.

Fast forward another two years, Giugiaro was by this time held in such great esteem that he got Ferrari to build him a one-off model before its Special Projects programme ever saw the light of day.

The year was 2004. On the sidelines of the Paris Motor Show, Giugiaro and Ferrari’s then-CEO Luca di Montezemolo got to talking and the designer brought up the idea of commissioning a one-of-one Prancing Horse for himself and his family to celebrate 50 years of automotive penmanship.

Di Montezemolo was convinced, and a year later, the Ferrari GG50 – based on the 612 Scaglietti – was unveiled at the Tokyo Auto Show, complete with bespoke bodywork sculpted by the Italian maestro.

Giugiaro’s one-of-one Ferrari GG50

Entering the 2010s, Giugiaro decided it was time to slow down and sold 90% of his company to Lamborghini Holdings, yes, that Lamborghini.

The octogenarian is quite secretive about his private life, though sources say that he now spends most of his days at his home in Turin, enjoying the finer things in life.

The Golf is credited as the car that became a milestone in automotive history and marked a new beginning for VW, just like many others that were conceptualised in the secretive halls and backrooms of Italdesign.

It’s safe to say that the automotive world would have looked a lot different today had it not been for the blessed mind and hands of one Giorgetto Giugiaro.

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