Not quite a classic: Fiat Coupe

Proportions more arresting than elegant. Superfluous, slash-like indentations above the wheel housings.

Double-blistered headlamp covers, deep-recessed taillights, an aluminium flip-top fuel filler, an aluminium key-fob and a bold repeat of the car’s exterior colour arcing across the dashboard. 

This was the Fiat Coupé, a car unexpectedly signaling that its maker was ready to build sports cars again, and a car signaling the arrival of one Chris Bangle, a designer who would soon stir up the car industry like few designers before him.

This car was a surprise not just for its shape, but because Fiat had previously said that it would no longer make pure sports cars, despite a glorious run in the 1960s that included the pretty 850 Coupé and Spider, the 124 Spider, the 124 and 128 Coupés, the Dino Coupé and the exquisite Fiat Dino Spider. 

That was before Paolo Cantarella arrived to take charge of Fiat Auto in 1989.

Cantarella was a businessman who had previously managed the Fiat Group’s industrial robot division Comau, but he was also a car enthusiast, and acutely aware of the Italian car industry’s past successes

Like any CEO, his overriding mission was to keep the Fiat Auto motor running sweetly, and while Puntos and Pandas sold by the trainload, the bigger Tipos and Cromas were more of a struggle. 

The Fiat brand needed some burnishing and, if the numbers could be made to work, this new coupé could help. 

Work began around 1991 at both Fiat Centro Stile and Pininfarina, the pair producing quite different proposals. 

Pininfarina’s was crisp, subtle, well-proportioned, elegant and conventional. 

Fiat’s in-house suggestion bordered on the outlandish, its wheel arches capped with angled elliptical blisters in black, a crease bisecting the upper third of its doors at exactly the same angle. Its tail was short, its boot lid no more than a modest capping.

It wasn’t beautiful but it was daring, original and fresh. Fiat bravely went with this proposal rather than Pininfarina’s, and while the finished article grew a longer and appealingly pert tail, the spirit of Bangle’s startling design survived largely intact. 

Pininfarina’s interior suggestion featuring a swathe of body colour paneling across dashboard and doors easily won the interior competition, the coachbuilder also winning the manufacturing contract.