Page 101 - Wayne Carini's Guide to Affordable Classics

Chrysler’s “D’Elegance” show car, designed by Virgil Exner and constructed by Ghia, was the direct inspiration for the Karmann Ghia, sharing its basic proportions and many of its design cues.
THE BACKSTORY
The Volkswagen Karmann Ghia represents a fascinating side road from the history of the otherwise mundane, though enduringly popular, VW Beetle. At the center of its origin story is Luigi Segre, who in the early 1950s was the commercial director of the Italian coachbuilder Ghia, then being led by Mario Boano. Having learned English while working for the OSS during World War II, Segre leveraged his language skills to find new business in the US, where he befriended Chrysler president K.T. Keller and its lead designer, Virgil Exner. At the time, Keller and Exner were looking for less expensive ways to build concept vehicles and Segre promised substantial savings over in-house costs.
Volkswagen Karmann Ghia
In the meantime, Segre had been introduced to coachbuilder Wilhelm Karmann via a French VW dealer. Karmann’s firm, founded 1901 by his father in Osnabrück, Germany, specialized in convertible bodies for firms like Adler and Ford. Its relationship with VW started in the mid-1930s when Ferdinand Porsche asked Karmann to create a prototype for a convertible model of the fledgling “Type 1” Beetle. The chaos of the war prevented the idea from being pushed forward, but on August 1, 1949, Karmann signed an order from Volkswagen for 1,000 Type 15 convertibles, the foundation for the famous Beetle Cabriolet. It was good business for Karmann: over the next 50 years, Karmann would go on to produce over 331,000 examples for VW.
Just as Karmann was eager to expand his business beyond the Beetle, so, too, was Segre eager to find new opportunities to grow Ghia, and a relationship with VW could prove quite lucrative given the growing demand for affordable cars in Western Europe. Segre managed to obtain a Beetle chassis via Boano’s son and within five months an initial model was complete. That model bore an astonishing resemblance to an Exner-styled concept car that Ghia was constructing for Chrysler called the D’Elegance. There was no question that the VW proposal had been lifted (though resized, of course) from Exner’s design, but when Exner first saw the VW design at Ghia, he was more amused than angry and regarded it as the ultimate form of flattery. “There was only one D’Elegance,” wrote Mike Lamm in Special Interest Autos, but with over 400,000 examples produced, the Karmann Ghia was “the most widely distributed of any show car design.”
Debut – 1955
Karmann arranged for VW to review Ghia’s initial proposal behind the scenes at the 1953 Paris Salon; it was well received by
The original Karmann Ghia prototype from 1953.
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