The automotive world nearly lost one of its most prolific designers late last month when Giorgetto Giugiaro crashed and rolled his Land Rover Defender down a cliff off the side of a hairpin turn in Sardinia. The 87-year-old creator of such greats as the original Volkswagen Golf and BMW M1 says he was already out of the SUV and on his feet by the time emergency responders arrived, despite plunging 50 feet onto a road below. Now, safely back at home in Turin, he’s reflected on his incredible luck in a memoir published by an Italian newspaper—though, he considers it more of a privilege.
“I owe it to the technology that I have contributed, in my own small way, to shape,” Giugiaro wrote for La Stampa, translated via Google. “If I had been in a car from fifteen years ago—the average age of cars circulating on Italian roads—I probably wouldn’t be here to tell you about it. The statistics don’t lie: A new car, with its safety features, offers seven times more chances of surviving an accident than one from fifteen years ago. I am one of those times.”
Giugiaro was driving alone when the incident happened, and fortunately, no other vehicles or people were involved in the crash. He fractured three lower vertebrae and is wearing an orthopedic support brace as a result, but according to his son Fabrizio, a car designer in his own right, he’s in good spirits. “Dad, miraculously unharmed despite the flight, is annoyed because he will not be able to use his bike in August,” he told Quattroruote shortly after the incident.
On Saturday, little more than a week removed from the wreck, Giorgetto said he was aching to get back on his trial bike and back to work. And he’s more than aware of the serendipity of it all, having spent, in his words, “a lifetime taming chaos on a blank sheet of paper.”
“My car, with its belts with intelligent pretensioners, the thousand airbags, the reinforced body with progressive deformation, protected me like a shell. It was the difference between an epilogue and a new beginning,” Giugiaro wrote, adding that “security, today, is a luxury. Those who can afford a new car have a better chance of returning home alive. In 2024, in Italy, we counted 173,364 road accidents. How many of those drivers, in dated cars, did not have my luck? Technology saves lives, but it is a salvation that costs dearly. And this, for someone like me, who has always wanted to design cars for everyone, is a burning thought.”
Today, Italdesign, the firm Giugiaro started in 1968, belongs to Volkswagen; the founder resigned from the company a decade ago. He continues to work alongside his son at their GFG Style studio. Despite the stunning career Giugiaro has already enjoyed, this unfortunate episode is sure to shape his imagination going forward. “Perhaps, who knows, a new line will be born from this misadventure, a new way of thinking about safety,” he concluded. “Because the future, like cars, is drawn one stroke at a time. And I, I assure you, still have a lot of blank sheets to fill and canvases to draw.”
Safety has always been a luxury, as the designer says. It might be discouraging to think that only those able to afford the latest and greatest technology, developed by Giugiaro himself and his peers, benefit most from it. But if you survey the entire scope of automotive development spanning more than a century at this point, those life-saving advancements eventually do trickle down to more accessible, mass-market vehicles. There should always be an effort to normalize public safety, but in the end, driving is safer today, on average, because of innovators like him.
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