Legendary Italian coachbuilder and vehicle designer Italdesign was acquired by Volkswagen Group back in 2010. Five years later, Audi received a 100% share in it. We expected some fresh ideas to be born out of that union at the time, but none of the recent concepts churned out by the once-famous brand resonated with us. Well, Italdesign has now been sold to a California-based company named UST.
Let’s do a quick recap first. Renowned automotive designer Giorgetto Giugiaro founded the company in 1968. It has since co-produced over 300 vehicles for the mass market and came up with more than 100 design studies and concepts on top of that – quite prolific by any standard.
In the 21st century, however, the relevance of such independent design companies has gradually waned as automakers increasingly preferred designing everything in the house. Making things worse for the company was the fact that Giugiaro – whose name was closely associated with the success of the company – left it in 2015 selling his remaining stock.
After waving their founder goodbye, Italdesign proceeded to come up with a limited-edition Nissan GT-R50, a modern take on the DeLorean DMC-12 and most recently a fairly uninspired-looking coupe-SUV called the EVX Project.
UST is a company based in Aliso Viejo, CA, United States that specializes in AI-powered engineering solutions. It claims to have branch offices in 30 countries employing a total of 30,000 people. It’s worth noting that Italdesign isn’t a small business, either, with a staff of 1,300. Since no details have been revealed about the deal, we have no idea how the once-famous Italian marque will fare under new leadership. If we had to speculate, we’d venture a guess that it will be UST calling the shots this time around.
