Italdesign: More than five decades at the forefront

As a service provider for styling, technical development, prototyping, and ultra-limited series production, Italdesign supports automotive manufacturers worldwide. Italdesign is not only a coachbuilder but also an important player in mobility, capable of influencing market changes with new and innovative designs as well as technologies. In recent times, Italdesign has become a systems developer for automotive electronics such as infotainment, ADAS (advanced driver-assistance systems), and high-voltage battery systems. The company is thus able to provide support in solutions for software-defined vehicles (SDV).

The company, headquartered in Moncalieri (Turin, Italy) and part of the Volkswagen Group since 2010, currently employs 1,231 people in Italy, Germany, Spain, China, and the United States. As of 2023, Italdesign has been certified “Top Employer Italy” for the eighth year in a row.

In October of 2023, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Asso di Picche concept first unveiled at the 1973 Frankfurt Motor Show, the company unveiled a digital design concept for an electric 2+2 coupé that translates the original model into the future. It is called the Italdesign Asso di Picche in Movimento. Climb-E, a door-to-door mobility machine, premiered at CES in Las Vegas at the beginning of the year, went on an international tour throughout 2023.

Italdesign’s engineering department, with its competencies in electrics and electronics, as well as in whole vehicle integration, constantly grew in 2023. The number of Audi turn-key projects, called "captain model projects", that place high requirements on the company strongly increased too.

This growth is set to boost interest in Italdesign services from other brands of the Volkswagen Group, help optimize development times and costs, and can also open new opportunities for collaboration with other companies.

Production in the Preseries Center has also been working on turn-key projects, thus enabling Italdesign to cover the entire project scope. Competence transformation and investment have been focused on ensuring close-to-series production to support preseries phases, delivering fully testable objects. In addition, the company’s skills in the vehicle pre-startup and vehicle startup sectors expanded in 2023 as well.

Italdesign continues to strengthen its commitment to initiatives in the field of ESG (environmental, social, governance) through newly established sustainability governance headed by an ESG Committee and a newly appointed ESG officer. Using the double materiality assessment performed in 2023, the company is laying the foundation for its first Corporate Sustainability Report in 2024. Rooted in its social responsibility, Italdesign has successfully concluded several positive impact measures to reflect the company’s commitment to social issues, especially in local communities.

The need to update and re-design the buildings at its headquarters in Moncalieri to meet the changed demands of modern ways of working led the company to invest in the Domus Project. It aims to create a more modern, attractive, and sustainable workplace. The project will run for the next four years. Work at the construction site to renovate the first of three buildings at the headquarters to be overhauled commenced in late 2023. Cutting-edge techniques used in the design and three-dimensional modeling make Italdesign highly competitive in project development timelines and, hence, in time-to-market new products.