Page 41 - Marcello Gandini Maestro of Design Revisited

ON WATSON FINE BOO
GANDINI
QUADRICYCLE
2001
545
monocoque shell of a vehicle is stamped and welded
together, and then passed through the complicated paint
With the promising launch and then the
subsequent failure of the Matra M72 quadricycle
city car — an idea perhaps long before its time
— Marcello Gandini began reimagining the La Piccola
concept all over again.
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process with pretreatment to prevent rusting. When the
painted body arrives at the assembly line, workers swarm
all over it to drop the engine into the engine bay, bolt the
seats and the dashboard and the inside trims and other
parts within the shell, add the suspension and the wheels
and brakes and so on.
Therefore, in modern times, an automobile manufacturing
facility needs a stamping shop with huge expensive
stamping presses, a weld shop which uses many
extremely expensive robots to make the work easier and
maintain quality, an elaborate paint shop with various
dips and treatments for the metal bodies and then paint
them, and an assembly line with scores of workstations
and hundreds of workers.
Since the 1980s, since La Piccola, Marcello Gandini
had been working on how to simplify the system of
manufacturing, the same way that the manufacturing of
“Current manufacturing processes for automobiles, most
of which are monocoque, is all wrong,” believed Gandini.
“It’s a bit like building the model of a sailing ship and then
putting it into a bottle with the masts all folded, and then
once placed carefully inside, pulling the strings to get the
masts upright. A complicated and inefficient method.”
As we know, current car-making means that the fully built
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audio systems had been — the body went on top of the
mechanical system, which had been assembled earlier.
So, to decouple the mechanical elements into a subframe
and have them bolted on to the completed body shell
seemed to be the solution. Moreover, the body shell
itself would integrate most of the items that made up
the interiors, such as the dashboard, the ceiling, the trim
panels, the backrest of the seats when possible.
With this in mind, Marcello Gandini set about developing
the concept of a back-to-basic lightweight two-seater city
runabout, which could meet light quadricycle norms of a
kerb weight under 350 kg, and provide better weather
protection than the Matra M72, plus some relevant
boot space behind the driver/passenger and above the
powertrain located at the rear, driving the rear wheels.
As it was a private project, more of an exercise to
conceptualize the hard points and packaging, the
concept did not see the light of day.
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 A logical evolution
DALTON WATSOof the Matra M72 idea
in a much prettier form
with more practical
attributes. MARCELLO
GANDINI ARCHIVES