Not bad for a crossover, but terrible for a De Tomaso. Courtesy Pininfarina
With a tip of the hat to Monty Python, we can’t help repeating ourselves over the exciting Pininfarina De Tomaso Deauville which was introduced at the Geneva Auto Show last week.
By Wallace Wyss
Just when you thought the name “DeTomaso” was dead as an Italian marque, it’s back. And guess who designed one of the first new proposals for the once-defunct Italian brand? Chez Pininfarina , who showed a new Deauville prototype crossover at the Geneva show.
DeTomaso was a firm started in 1959 by Alejandro deTomaso and his American-born wife Isabelle Haskell. Originally they built single seat racers but with the mid-engined Vallelunga of the early ‘60s, they began building two seat sports cars. They eventually embraced the Ford V8 and built, in succession, and sometimes simultaneously, the Mangusta, the Pantera, the Deauville and the Longchamp. Their last production car was the Guara, a mid-engined car that started out with a BMW V8.
The front view is the most exciting an otherwise insipid car. The grille cavity looks a bit Maserati, though we wish it had a chrome grille mesh. The lower air intakes are interesting. But the slanted headlights look like many different Japanese cars. The whole stance of the car from the front looks like an SUV.
The firm died not long after deTomaso himself did. His son Santiago did not step in to keep the firm going. It is said that the company foundered after investing too much of their own money to develop an SUV with Russian investors who never came up with their share of the expenses.
Now the marque has a new owner…businessman Gian Mario Rossignolo, for whom Pininfarina designed a 5-door Sport Luxury Sedan, with an aluminum chassis and four-wheel drive. The new car idea was launched at the end of 2009, when Pininfarina S.p.A. working with De Tomaso Automobili SpA (formerly Innovation Auto Industry S.p.A. – IAI) a company chaired by Rossignolo, the deal including the manufacturing plant of Grugliasco (Turin).
Could you get any blander? This could be some Chevrolet economy car. There is nothing from the rear that says 'DeTomaso' or even Italian.
They decided the first model from the newborn company would be a sport luxury sedan. The original Deauville, incidentally, was DeTomaso’s infradig at Jaguar, whose XJ6 was popular even in Italy. DeTomaso ordered his chief designer, American-born Tom Tjaarda, to more or less envision an XJ6 that was Italianized. At one point Ford even thought of using the body design for a car that would have a Maverick underpinnings!
Pininfarina said that each of the new Deauvilles would be “custom-built” and emphasized that there would be a lot of manual labor by De Tomaso specialist craftsmen to make each car unique.
The hood needs to be about a foot longer to give it a grand touring look. The whole car looks like an SUV, being tall and narrow. And even the traditional DeTomaso ‘t’ insignia (said to be derived from the family’s cattle brand as deTomaso came from Argentina where his family owned a vast cattle ranch) has been distorted and is no longer recognizable.
The car would be built using what they called “innovative UNIVIS technology,” which they explain means the bodyshell is assembled using aluminum-extruded sections joined together by crossbeams that are pressed, trimmed by laser and welded. This new technology, developed and patented by IAI (Innovation in Auto Industry), the parent company of the De Tomaso group, makes it possible, they say, to drastically reduce the times and investment necessary to design a car, because the number of dies is drastically reduced to a few dozen.
If anything it resembles a BMW model, one of the odd shaped ones that can’t decide if it wants to be an SUV or a sedan.The air vent on the side is interesting but only a bright spot in a dull dull design.
Although they claim that the new Deauville was designed after “ a historical analysis of the De Tomaso brand,” intimating that they were picking up design cues from the Mangusta or the Pantera, this writer could not find no such influence. The press release from Pininfarina said “The challenge was to imagine a completely new type of car without distorting such an important heritage, but also to firmly avoid turning it into an exercise in nostalgia.”
Bland as bland can be. Indistinguishable from any low price Korean or Japanese car as far back as the '70s.
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IN SUM: Our advice to the new owner of DeTomaso: either get Pininfarina to come up with a more dramatic design or quit while you’re ahead before going into production because this design says absolutely nothing, nothing at all about the heritage of DeTomaso or about Italian design. Maybe Porsche can get away with making an ugly car like the Panamera because they are Porsche, with a great name, background, and engineers, but this new DeTomaso design shares nothing with DeTomaso’s past and the phrase “Made in Italy” has no pull if it’s ugly….
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Wallace Wyss has been writing about design for 40-plus years and has published ten automotive histories. He has served as a consultant to several major auto-makers.
This Deauville ( after SLC , after SLS but Daimler Benz was angry against De Tomaso about this names ) . This car will have GM and VM Motori engines
V6 2.8 L Turbo 300 ch ( yhe same as we find in the Cadillac SRX and Saab 9-4X
V8 7.0 L 500 ch more or less ( from the Corvette Z06 )
V6 3.0 L diesel from VM Motori , the same as we’ll fiond in the Chrysler Lancia ( Thema, Grand Voyager ). To recall , this engine shoud be in the new CTS but GM had said no…
The platform is …the same as the SRX as, more ou less, the interior.
In Europe this car is a bad surprise and its reception hasn’t very good .
In Europe, the price ‘ll be between 90000€ and 130000€ depending on the finish.
The production must start this summer.
But many problems are here :
-Workers are on strike because because they’re not paid since this autumn
-BEI ( European Investment Bank ) has refused all loans
-A low loan must arrive from Bruxelles but all authorities aren’t agree
Rossignolo, the owner of De Tomaso has said that in november, in L.A Autoshow , we could see the new Pantera …He wants to buy Termini Imerese ( a big plant of Fiat ), he wants to create a big factory in India for produce 300000 cars by year and he said he found some partners in India and he offers them 30% of De Tomaso ( at this moment : only a name, an old factory Pininfarina in Grugliasco and some non rolling models of Deauville ) it’s less for 100 millions euros.
Here we have many doubts about this rebirth of de Tomaso.
We think this history of New De Tomaso is a joke but I hope I’m wrong but we’ll talk in a year or… before !
Just one thing to finish, you can’t see on this big and not very niceDeauville, the Pininfarina logo. The Carrozzeria Pinifarina musn’t be proud of this design and we understand. ( Even the not very nice Hyundai Matrix had this logo ! )
De Tomaso is a part of automotive history ant it should remain so , you don’t believe ? In Europe, only the integrist of the italian automotive think different .
Looks like a mazda 3…
This one’s strictly Doughville–purely an attempt to cash in on a couple of famous names. If you asked 100 car enthusiasts whether this was a Pininfarina-designed De Tomase or an in-house design for Hyundai, not one would pick the Italians. The aluminum production technology sounds interesting, but I wouldn’t want to argue for its possibilities based on this banal lump.