Abarth design chief: “we won’t be doing retro design”

You can now buy a funky-looking Abarth 600e in the UK, and despite it taking inspiration from the 850 TC of the 1960s, design boss Francois Leboine said Abarth “won’t be doing retro design”.

“This has to do with the evolution of the customers,” Leboine told TG. “We have different generations of customers in Abarth and obviously the previous generation of customers were classic petrolheads. For them you have to reference your heritage. You have to talk about old cars and refer to the past.

"The new generation loves cars and still loves old cars, but the younger generation also loves to play driving games, and they consider the design of the graphics and screens to be important. They like a modernity. They use their phones every day, so the animations and graphics are important.”

Yep, the 600e’s design was apparently also influenced by the gaming world. As you can see from the sketches above, the squared-off front bumper clearly takes inspiration from the protruding radiator on the 850 TC, while the 600e’s spoiler harks back to the permanently open engine cover, but Leboine said the blocky sections of the 600e (and the new diagonal line graphic over the bumpers) were also inspired by the digital world. Perhaps we’ll see an Abarth 600e Minecraft Edition in the near future.

 
“Abarth has to evolve,” says Leboine. “We used this type of graphic design to become a source of inspiration for the new elements that we applied to the car. And it fits very well because then we make a connection with the technical, digital, flat design and we use them to connect the elements of reality – the seats, the bumpers – to the displays in the car.

“For Abarth, we definitely try to connect the design to the performance of the vehicle. That means depending on the level of performance, we will enhance the design. We will never try to over-design a car that has limited performance.

“We tried to use every performance element of the car to increase the silhouette. So, we could incline the fascia even more and give this dramatic shark nose effect on the car.”

More sketching up above shows that aquatic influence on the face of the 600e. Anyone else getting the urge to have a crack at car design?

“Of course, the wheels play a big role because as a 20in wheel they’re very visible,” said Leboine. “A big wheel is symbolic of a sports car. We used this kind of star design that’s a bit Ferrari-like from the 1970s and 1980s. That was to make the wheel as light as possible.”

Lots of discussion of retro inspiration then. Lots of discussion about legacy and car design in general recently too. Thanks for that, Jaguar. But Leboine (who joined Fiat and Abarth from Renault having penned the concept for the new 5) still insists that the 600e – and future Abarth designs – aren’t all about the nostalgia.

“The connection to the Abarth history will always remain. We will try to pick in our past the beginning of a story and then we will turn it into a more modern thing. We will always combine the past and our history – because we are proud of it – to the future of the company because we want to project it to the new generation of customers. That will be the strategy that we follow.”