This is the single greatest honor in the motor vehicle industry, intended to honor a career and/or lifetime achievement. To become a "Hall of Famer" the nominee must be either retired or deceased. Recipients must have significantly impacted the development of the automobile or the motor vehicle industry. Typically, four to eight individuals are inducted each year.
Simply put, Nuccio Bertone was a design genius. He discovered great designers and employed them at Carrozzeria Bertone, his family’s Italian design house and coachbuilder, and produced some of the most incredible and memorable automotive designs the world has ever seen.
Bertone came by his design sense naturally. His father, Giovanni Bertone, founded Carrozzeria Bertone in 1912 after working as a carriage wheel maker. The auto industry was still very much in its infancy and the elder Bertone realized the importance of superior design and craftsmanship.
The young Nuccio would listen at the family dinner table has his father related the activities at the shop: the people, the places and, especially, the cars. For Nuccio Bertone, the passion was always about the cars.
He joined his father in 1934 at the age of 20 and became increasingly interested in the business, not just design, bu manufacturing.
Following World War II, Nuccio Bertone took over running the family business and found himself running a business that was outdated and with few customers.
But Nuccio Bertone also saw opportunity. Unitized bodies were becoming more common, and Bertone invested heavily in new equipment and technology. He also searched for some of the most talented young designers in Italy.
One of the first designers he discovered was a young Giorgetto Giugiaro, who would later become one of the great designers in his own right.
At the 1952 Torino Motor Show, he surprised the automotive world with two beautiful MGs, and immediately received orders to build 200 of them. Alfa Romeo took notice, and awarded Bertone with the job of designing the Giulietta Sprint. This car came to symbolize the Italian GT car the world over. Alfa originally had planned to build only a few hundred copies, but in large part due to the sporting Bertone design, nearly 40,000 were eventually sold.
Under Nuccio Bertone’s watchful eye and guidance, Carrozzeria Bertone produced many groundbreaking cars, such as the Lamborghini Miura, Espada and Countach, the Alfa Romeo Montreal, the Iso Grifo, the Lancia Stratos, and the Fiat Dino Coupe.
The company produced 140,000 Fiat 850 Spiders and 180,000 Fiat X 1/9 Spiders, and because of those larger volumes, Bertone designs could be enjoyed around the world.
Nuccio Bertone will be best remembered as a nurturer of design talent and as having a profound sense of what made great design.
“A car is the product of a feeling, or rather, a series of feelings,” Bertone once said. “The most important of these is the sense of wonder and surprise generated by the form of the vehicle. If a car fails to fill me with this sense of wonder at first sight, I am almost certain that it will not be a success.”
Nuccio Bertone never truly retired. Even in his later years he would take a keen interest in the business, particularly in design. He would visit the design studios, typically on Saturday mornings, so as not to interfere or intimidate the designers. But come Monday morning, the designers would find notes on their drawing boards with Nuccio’s observations and suggestions.
Nuccio Bertone died in 1997 at the age of 83, and left an automotive design legacy that will remain forever.
