Bertone's Bookends: Alfa Romeo BATs

The early Fifties marked a time of change for Alfa Romeo, founded in 1910, and for Carrozzeria Bertone, which had been founded two years later.  Alfa introduced its first mass-produced car, the middle-class 1900, in 1950, in time to address the demand for cars in an economy rebuilding after World War 2.  Nuccio Bertone had taken charge of his father's coach building house after that war, and was seeking design as well as production contracts with auto firms.  Alfa released the new 1900 in chassis form for special bodies by Pinin Farina, Castagna and Touring, in order to attract attention to the new line.  Bertone, with new chief designer Franco Scaglione*, a student of aeronautics, aimed to create a car with a minimum drag coefficient (Cd) in order to exploit the performance potential of the Alfa inline four, one of the first mass-produced engines (along with the Jaguar XK) with dual overhead cams.

When their Berlina Aerodynamica Technica (BAT) appeared in 1953, it stunned crowds at auto shows.  The nose was low and the hood dipped below the curved fender forms, with headlights concealed behind doors flanking the twin-nostril grille.  The first car, BAT 5, set the pattern for the series with its covered wheels, compound-curved greenhouse, integrated fins formed into the light alloy body panels, and teardrop shapes repeated in the cabin plan and body section.  The BAT name seemed appropriate to English-speaking enthusiasts, because the car's fins, intended to increase directional stability, reminded them of bat wings.

The cabin was purposeful without being stark, with hooded instruments directly ahead of the driver and seats contoured to provide side support under cornering loads...

Bertone had attracted production contracts from Chicago's S.H. Arnolt for a series of special-bodied MGs and then the famous Arnolt Bristol in 1953, but was still trying to land an order from Alfa.  In 1954, the firm showed Scaglione's BAT 7, with a lower-penetration nose, cleaner flanks, and more fully enveloping fins.  Decades before "biomorphic design" became a catchphrase, the BAT 7 reminded onlookers of some kind of exotic sea creature. It's shown below, and at the center of the trio of cars in the top photo.

The photo above shows how the fins wrap over the roof.  Headlight mountings were changed so the lights descended from the top of the air intakes; the photo above shows them retracted. Scaglione lowered the nose of BAT 7, and the car achieved the lowest drag coefficient of the three original BATs, a figure of 0.19, stunning even by today's standards. Top speed was over 120 mph. Headlights are pivoted downward for use in the photo below. Absence of bumpers helped the lines and the aerodynamics, and kept weight down, but highlight the fact that BAT 7 was not aimed at everyday use.

The interior view shows the contoured seats with side bolsters, the rear-hinged "suicide" doors and right-hand drive unique to BAT 7, and also the lateral and rear visibility problems posed by those enveloping fins.  By now Alfa management was paying attention, and had awarded Bertone the contract to design and build a new coupe on their upcoming Giulietta chassis.  That car, with a new all-aluminum twin cam engine of just 1300cc, would find a new market for small performance cars, and shake up the industry.  

All three original BATs appeared together for the first time at Pebble Beach in 1989.  Below we see the relatively tame silver BAT 9 in the foreground, with the metallic blue BAT 7 parked between it and the gun-metal gray BAT 5...

With BAT 9 in 1955, Scaglione and Bertone seemed to aim for a more practical, "daily driver" iteration of their BAT concept.  They reduced the scope and complexity of the fins, simplified body contours, and substituted covered headlights for the concealed, pivoting units of the previous two versions.  The traditional Alfa grille at the prow may have been a signal to Alfa management that the car was ready for limited production.  But Alfa was committed to large scale production of Scaglione's design for the Giulietta Sprint* (40,000 would eventually be built), and a healthy number of Scaglione's Sprint Speciale*, both of which would keep Bertone's assembly lines, which would soon rival those at Pininfarina, humming for years. 

The strong horizontal ledge Scagione introduced on BAT 9, in the foreground below, as well as the shape of the split rear window shown in plan view in the topmost shot, have been cited by the Blackhawk Museum Curator Tim McGrane as possible influences on GM Styling's design for the 1963 Corvette coupe. The window design on the Chevy is similar, but the horizontal crease on that car is located well above the wheels, and wraps around the entire car, as it does on GM's seminal 1960 Corvair.  BAT 9 four years before the earliest Sting Ray prototype, so American designers, who attended European car shows, had plenty of time to study it... 

After a long career designing and building cars for Alfa Romeo, including Giorgetto Giugiaro's  GTV (1963-76) and the Gandini-designed V8 Montreal (1970-77) as well as  bodies for Fiat, Simca, Iso and Lamborghini, Bertone designed and built the Volvo 780 coupes in the 1990s, and produced Opel cabriolets for GM into the 21st century.  The Alfa connection faded, until 2006 when Dr. Gary Kaberle, a dentist who had bought BAT 9 from a used car lot as a teenager and kept it for decades until selling it to support medical treatment for  his wife, provided a new opportunity for Bertone to design a successor to the BAT series.  Working under Stile Bertone's design chief David Wilkie, designer Valery Muller reinterpreted the original tapered, winged form as a series of planar intersections, fitting the bodywork after wind tunnel studies to a Maserati GT chassis (chosen for the long wheelbase) with modern Alfa 8C drivetrain. The overall impression was perhaps more science fiction than biomorphic...

…but the design provided the same restricted outward side and rear vision as BAT 7 had, five decades earlier.  Perhaps this mattered less in the era of rear vision cameras.  The BAT 11 was scheduled to make an appearance at the Geneva Salon in 2008, but the display was cancelled owing to the bankruptcy of Carrozzeria Bertone, the car-building arm of Gruppo Bertone. The new car was shown instead at a private party for designers, and I photographed it 4 years latter at Concorso Italiano in California, amid rumors that Stile Bertone might soon disappear.

The end of designing cars, and later of building cars, for the great Italian design houses like Pininfarina and Bertone was part of a pattern that included the decline of custom one-off bodywork in the 1960s, the disappearance of boutique car builders like Abarth, Iso and eventually De Tomaso that began in the 1970s, and the rise of in-house design and prototyping facilities at major manufacturers in the last years of the 20the century.  Added to this was that fact that firms like Bertone, Pininfarina and Zagato were run by family members with varying degrees of devotion to, and talent at, the disciplines of industrial design and business management. Gruppo Bertone declared bankruptcy in spring of 2014, and its collection of 79 concept cars, prototypes and classic Bertone-designed production cars was auctioned the following summer.  It turned out that the saga of Bertone's rise to prominence, as well as its eclipse as a force in the industry, was bookended by these Alfa Romeo idea cars. 

Postscript:  This essay marks the 5th anniversary of this blog, which began on August 25, 2015 with "A Review of the Monterey Auction Weekend."  235 essays and over 116,000 visits have followed that moment.  I want to thank everyone who has had a look, and send out the hope that the next five years are more promising than this last one.

*Footnote:  To view the BAT series in the context of other one-off cars, please check into our archives for "One of One: A Brief History of Singular Cars", posted on 9-7-15.  Franco Scaglione's memorable designs for Bertone and others are surveyed in "Unsung Genius Franco Scaglione: The Arc of Success", posted on 12-20-17. 

Photo Credits:

All photos are by the author except the following:

Top:  wikimedia

3rd from top (BAT 5 rear view):  George Havelka

4th (BAT 5 interior): classicdriver.com

7th (BAT 7 interior): classicdriver.com