“Car Design is All About Strategy”: Conversation with Fabio Ferrante, Chief Designer of Puritalia Automobili

Often, people take design for granted, but many of the great products, inventions, and items we see and use every day have undergone countless hours of design. With this in mind, we have interviewed a selection of designers, to hear about them, their design processes, their portfolio of work, and their thoughts on the future of cars and AR. This first interview is with Fabio Ferrante, a car designer from Italy.

My job is my passion

My name is Fabio Ferrante, I’m an Italian Designer based in New York. I’m the Chief Designer of Puritalia Automobili, a small but very unique limited edition sports car manufacturer. I’m also a design consultant focused on tech and consumer electronics, mostly in the US and Europe. Last but not least, I’m a Design Professor at the IED (European Institute of Design) in the Transportation Dept.

I started my career at the FCA Design Research Center under the mentorship of Pietro Camardella, father of the most iconic Ferrari models of the ’80s and 90s such as the F40, the 456 GT, and the Mythos. After that, at I.De.A institute I worked very closely with the FCA Design Center and also with the Chinese FAW group, for which I had the pleasure to work on several productions and concept cars.

I’m totally in love with concept design in general where technology is 100% involved, and I’m constantly working on personal projects. My job — I know it’ll sound cliched — happens to be my passion as well.

Projects I’m most proud of

PURITALIA BERLINETTA: the dream that became reality. The company asked me to approach the project just like I had always dreamed of. I grew up with the masters of Italian car design right in front of me: Gandini, Pininfarina, Giugiaro, Bertone. I was asked to lead a small but professional team, working very closely with the engineering dept and following the whole development process. It was like the Golden Era of Italian car design. And the presentation in Geneva 2019 was the perfect finale.

FAW GO Concept: my first concept car presented at an international motor show. I was the lead exterior designer for the project and will never forget the emotions I felt hearing “your design proposal has been selected”. This concept created the design language for 3 other production cars that the team and I designed a few years later.

DRONIUM ONE: I’m particularly attached to this drone. I’d been approached by Protocol NY and they asked me to come up with some new ideas and shapes for their drone line-up.

I strongly wanted to create a familiar feeling and this model was my first brainchild. Since Protocol proudly is a New York company I felt the design language needed to represent that. The pentagon represents the five boroughs of the City of New York: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island and Staten Island.

It was a success. 18 months later, the brand became the 3rd most sold in the US, and we started a long collaboration with over 40 projects developed and 5 international Design Awards won.

PURITALIA 427: The first one-off designed for Puritalia Automobili. A 2 seater roadster with a huge American V8 under the hood/bonnet. A tribute to the glorious Shelby Cobra with an Italian style. It was the first project in collaboration with Puritalia and presented in Milan at the end of 2014.

NINETYSX_MP: A personal project that became one of the most important for me. It started as a tribute to one of my favorite cars, the Honda NSX, developed with the most amazing racing driver of all the time: Ayrton Senna. I showed one of the first renderings to a dear friend of mine, Mirco, who immediately said: “I love it, this is gonna be mine!”. He truly loved it.

Before I finished the project, unfortunately, Mirco passed away in a terrible crash on his bike. I decided to work tirelessly to finish this project in time for his next birthday and presented it online with a video. And now this car is his, with his initials on the name.

Design Approach: It all starts with analysis

Design doesn’t start from a pen and a piece of paper. That’s one of the later phases. Design, first of all, is strategy, understanding what the market needs and wants, analyzing what’s the right approach and what could be a successful language to make that approach effective. What I try to do, before I start working with my team, is to have all those points checked. And then you can finally start drawing!

It sounds like a very complex and long job to do — and it is actually — but it flows pretty naturally when you work with talented designers that have experience on how to bring successful products to the market.

Creativity is the key for a designer. But you have to feed your creativity by being aware of what your surroundings are. That’s how you’re going to be able to design something never seen before and find practical and clever solutions.

AR is the way to go

If safety is something important in what you’re doing, a heads-up display is kind of mandatory in my opinion. And if what you’re doing is driving…well, I guess you can easily tell what my answer is. In a world where “distraction” is the major threat to safety, I believe heads-up displays can let you stay “safely distracted”. Meaning it will allow you to stay multitasking and highly receptive without losing focus on the most important thing you’re doing while you’re behind the wheel: driving. And I can see that applied on delivery vehicles but also your exotic track-day cars, why not.

AR and Automotive Design: the future has only just begun

I can’t predict the future. I can only analyze the present being aware of what happened in the past. And I can say that I feel the future is here. AR is not just a big help in the safety department, it can also maximize your driving experience most of the time.

From my answers, you can easily tell I love technology. And I really do. But I also strongly believe that AR and also AI have just started to be players in the automotive world. Don’t get me wrong, I still consider myself a purist who loves to drive manual, alone in his car bathing in beautiful west coast scenery…but I cannot ignore also the beauty of the technological progress we’re living through today. I can’t help myself from embracing both worlds.

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