[woofa.express]

Written for my local car club magazine.

Italian auto designers Vincenzo Lancia and Pinin Farina.

Vincenzo Lancia was born in 1881, Italy. He started his working life as a bookkeeper for and Italian bicycle importer and developed a skill for design and construction. At 19 he became chief inspector with Fiat, then to test driver then again to racing driver and with great success.
In 1907 he built his first motorcar; the 12hp Alfa and much of this technology has continued to be used in todays vehicles. He produced many models that few of us would have heard of today however many of us would have heard of “Pininfarina” which he and his buddy Battista (Pinin) Farina founded. (Pininfarina was acquired by Mahindra in 2015.) Much of the development of Pininfarina is complex and of little interest to us so there is no point in me including it. During the 1930’s they built bodies for Lancia, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Cadillac and Rolls Royce plus others. They became the first coach builder to make unibodies, ie a body without a frame. They continued production during WW2 until their factory was bombed by the allies.
At this time of writing Pininfarina had produced some 74 body styles for companies mentioned above plus Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Nash, Peugeot, Ford, Volvo, Austin and Mitsubishi.
In 2021 Pininfarina had 700 employees of which 36 were designers. Remember it’s Indian now.
Lancia died in mid-life, 55, with heart attack.
I have acquired all of this information from the internet encyclopedia Wikipedia. This is a brief report only for a comprehensive one would be far too extensive and much of it meaningless to us. However you can go to this internet encyclopedia and read it yourselves.