Mystery and intrigue on the banks of the Neckar.
It all began with a casual conversation at a motor show, which touched on the Ro80 and its stylist, Claus Luthe. An acquaintance, with an extraordinary nose for the rarely trodden byways of automotive history said “You do know that Luthe probably didn’t design the Ro80?” I confessed I didn’t, but I was keen to know more.
“It’s in an old copy of CAR”, I was told. I asked if there was a possibility of a scanned copy of the article. “I’ll do better than that”, I was told; “I’ll send you the magazine”.
My informant sometimes needs a little reminding and cajoling, and a few months passed until the evidence arrived, the Car of the Year edition from March 1968, with the victorious Ro80 in frontal aspect on the cover. It didn’t disappoint, and anybody who shares my enthusiasm for this extraordinary car should seek a copy out.
Naturally, I went straight to the pages headed ‘So who really designed the Ro80? The Wind?’ written by Jerry Sloniger. It’s based around an interview with Luthe which is enlightening on many matters but evinces a sense of tension between the journalist and the “stocky close-cropped Klaus (sic) Luthe, product of a typically NSU artisan background”. With the conversation concluded, Sloniger drops the bombshell in the final three paragraphs:
To be equally honest, we at CAR doubt whether Klaus Luthe’s hand in the Ro 80’s styling was quite as sweeping as he makes out. No doubt he was the coordinator, but our own inclination is towards motor industry gossip which links the car’s aesthetic conception with the name of one Pio Manzù, 28 year old son of the Italian sculptor Giacomo Manzù. Pio studied at Ulm and now lives in Germany, although he works as a consultant on – of all things – tractor design. His career on cars began when he won Automobile Year’s styling competition in 1962 with a design for an Austin Healey 3000 body that was built and shown by Pininfarina. He did other work for Farina, including allegedly a special Fiat body called the Losana (sic) which appeared in 1964.
This had distinct affinities with the Ro80 and was followed by a body actually built on an NSU chassis – a two-seat coupe called the Autonova which appeared at Frankfurt three years ago and which Manzù designed in collaboration with a group of young Germans who also produced the NSU-based Delta sports car for last year’s Frankfurt show.
In the meantime, according to our information, but most decidedly not according to NSU, Manzù had worked in Neckarsulm for several months at exactly the time when NSU would have been freezing body designs for the Ro80. Whether it was really he, or the unknown Klaus (sic) Luthe (whose previous work with all due respect hardly shows world-shaking potential) was responsible for the body sculpture of this fascinating car we cannot say.
Whoever it was, we wish NSU would stop talking about wind tunnels and honour a truly original human talent.
At the outset of composing this piece, I had intended merely to report a largely forgotten, piece of speculation from almost half a century ago. That didn’t seem like value, and I was beginning to question what Sloniger suggested. Was he putting two and two together and making five?
My research took me down some curious routes, and to some enlightening discoveries on the way.
The ‘Pio Manzù as Ro80 designer’ story is absent from most authoritative accounts of the car’s history, but I found a couple of appearances.
One of Luthe’s obituaries states “Claus Luthe has always defended himself against these legends (or historical misrepresentations?). Always in a friendly tone, but always very determinedly; once he said, ‘old rum gains by aging, old rumours do not’.” Is this some old Westfalian folk-aphorism, or was Luthe a connoisseur of the rather unfashionable spirit?
Stephen Bayley also puts an odd twist on the rumour in his snappily titled book ‘Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything’:
“To avoid nagging questions of personal vanity, no design or engineering credits were ever given. So rumours began that this dramatic shape had been sculpted by Giacomo Manzù.”
Hold on – does the revered authority on all matters of design know something new? Was Pio’s dad behind the Ro80’s styling? There is no evidence of Manzù senior ever being involved in car design, so it is remotely possible that Stephen may have been sloppy in his researches on this occasion.
To make some sense of Sloniger’s speculation, I set myself a catechism. I’m never going to have Jerry’s access to the scuttlebutt of the mid-‘60s European automotive design community, but what passed thereafter may hold some clues.
First question – did Pio Manzù work on the Pininfarina show car which Sloniger claims to have influenced the Ro80’s styling?
“He (Manzù) did other work for Farina, including allegedly a special Fiat body called the Losana (sic) which appeared in 1964.”
The matter is more complicated than appears. Losanna (the Italian name for the city of Lausanne) was the third of a series of Pininfarina studies for a two seater coupe on the Fiat 2300 platform. The Cabriolet Speciale, second of the series, was shown at the Geneva Salon in March 1963.
The fixed head Losanna was exhibited at the Swiss National Exhibition in Lausanne, which opened in April 1964.
Both designs are credited to Tom Tjaarda. Did Manzù contribute to the designs? It’s possible he had some involvement, or at least knowledge as a visiting prodigy, but these do not look like Manzù cars. There’s a sensual curvaceousness which is quite alien to Manzù’s solo designs, which look chamfered and radiused – skilfully and sensitively – from geometric solids.
Pio Manzù’s reputation was founded on the Firrere, the winning entry in the 1961 Automobile Year design competition with Henner Werner, and Michael Conrad, fellow students at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, West Germany. It’s not exclusively Manzù, but the functional, rational forms are close to his later designs. The proportions of the body were fixed by the Austin-Healey 3000 chassis which it clothes. It was exhibited at Earls Court and Turin in 1962, and on the Pininfarina stand at Geneva in 1963, along with the Tjaarda’s Fiat-based Cabriolet Speciale. Comparing the two, the reader may draw their own conclusions.
Next question: Whether or not Manzù was involved, did the two Pininfarina designs influence the Ro80?
The evidence is before us to consider, and I’d suggest emphatically that they did. Earlier in the Sloniger interview, Luthe reveals that the original Ro80 concept was a 2+2, evolving into a four door saloon as the design process progressed. Luthe also admitted to hating the biennial Frankfurt IAA, but enjoying visits to the Turin and Geneva shows for “refreshment”, and I don’t think he meant rum.
At the time of the Ro80 launch, Luthe was not just NSU’s chief stylist, but the sole designer in a department comprising himself, two prototype body builders, and six modellers. His best regarded work was the Prinz 4, which was inspired and informed by the Chevrolet Corvair, but Luthe’s design demonstrated mastery of the task of adapting an existing shape to a smaller ‘canvas’. Could have applied a similar process, starting with the Pininfarina concepts?
Was Pio Manzù working at NSU at the time when the Ro80 was being designed?
Sloniger wrote “according to our information, but most decidedly not according to NSU, Manzù had worked in Neckarsulm for several months at exactly the time when NSU would have been freezing body designs for the Ro80.”
It’s highly likely Pio Manzù was at Neckarsulm, given that the second of the Autonova projects, the two-seater GT was based on the platform and drivetrain of the Prinz 1000TT. By this time – probably late 1963 – Henner Werner had dropped out of the trio, to be replaced by influential writer and polemicist Fritz B Busch, who was able to corral the support and contributions of NSU, Glas, Recaro, VDO and BASF. The Autonova GT was accorded semi-official status by its appearance on the NSU stand at the Frankfurt IAA in September 1964. But was it the harbinger of the Ro80, its secret half-sister?
Judge for yourselves. As with the Fiat 2300-based Cabriolet Speciale and Losanna, the Ro80 does not fit in with the Manzù oeuvre, before or after, or his philosophy of the automobile as an “object of use”:
“On the object of methodological research, in fact, the car has to be considered much the same as any other product: It’s a subject of design like a tractor or a pre-fabricated home. There is no reason why cars should be considered a product apart, and even less as the exclusive concern of a limited circle of initiates”
Pio Manzù “L’auto come Sistema” Style Auto no.3 1964
Despite its supposedly aerodynamically-led form, the Ro80 is very much a stylist’s car. Claus Luthe, in a much later interview, admitted that the final shape was arrived at “intuitively”, and after wind tunnel testing only minor changes were proposed, to vent intakes and outlets. These changes never made it to production; they were abandoned on grounds of costs. The wheel arch shapes were altered to make their shape more pleasing to the eye, without regard for aerodynamics. A Citroen SM-like glass panel between the headlights had to be replaced by a radiator grille as the cooling load for the Wankel engine had been underestimated.
A brief interlude: Ulm HfG and the Heilbronn Forschungabteilung
From 1960 until 1965, Pio Manzù was enrolled as a student at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, an easy 100km drive from the Heilbronn / Neckarsulm conurbation. It was far from being a hotbed of car design talent. The HfG’s faculty heads, who had a strong left-wing and anti-luxury tendency, all but forbade automotive design, considering cars “an unacceptable subject”, according to Michael Conrad in a 2006 interview. The Automobile Year competition was therefore something of an act of rebellion on the part of Conrad, Manzù and Werner, but the positive publicity their success generated for the HfG had the paradoxical result of an automotive design section being established under Professor Rodolfo Bonetto.
This largely explains why Pio Manzù’s thesis subject was “The design of an 80HP tractor, and ergonomic problems in the design of a tractor”. A tractor was not a car, but an object of utility, and therefore an appropriate subject in the ethos of the faculty.
Pio may have envied Tom Tjaarda, five years older, who studied at the Architecture School of the University of Michigan. He was allowed to present the design of an automobile – a sporting type of station wagon – rather than anything resembling a building, for his senior thesis.
Between – and possibly before – his 1965 graduation and his move to Fiat Centro Stile in 1968, Manzù spent periods as a consultant at Fiat’s experimental design and research centre in Heilbronn, known as the Forschungabteilung. Here some of Fiat’s finest talents, including Ettore Cordiano, Felice Cornaccia, and Sergio Camuffo were nurtured on special projects, far away from the tensions and robust vigour of the Turin design office, which Dante Giacosa described as “a closed and secret circle, so jealous of its own methods and traditions”.
The Agnellis were Manzù’s patrons, but not his masters, and this was a period of intense and diverse creativity for him, producing designs for furniture, office equipment, exhibition stands, lighting, signage, graphics and packaging, as well as the 850-based City Taxi.
My final question – did NSU bring in outside help to style the Ro80?
Sloniger writes, “his easy smile goes out like a candle in a blizzard if you hint at Italian influence in the Ro80”.
Bayley’s statement that “no design or engineering credits were ever given” is partially correct. At the Frankfurt IAA launch in September 1967, NSU’s management took a last minute decision not to mention individuals in press releases or publicity material. Six months later, with several major awards won, and huge critical acclaim, Claus Luthe and Ewald Praxl were out in the open, taking the credit and spreading the gospel.
At the time NSU was a proud and independent carmaker, and for some time in the 1950s had been the world’s largest manufacturer of powered two-wheelers, but it stretches credence to imagine that every element of the Ro80 was designed and engineered without recourse to external consultants. Some time ago I was shown this picture of a rather mysterious Ghia prototype from 1962. It’s not the Porsche saloon, and it is suggested it might be a study for Tatra for a T603 replacement.
If Jerry Sloniger had suggested that Tom Tjaarda had designed the Ro80 I may have been more easily persuaded…
The Corvair-inspired Prinz 4 demonstrated that Claus Luthe was something of a design ‘magpie’, and a capable one at that. Perhaps by the time the Ro80 was being shaped, he was capable of mixing and manipulating more diverse and complex influences.
Was Sloniger being mischievous, suggesting Pio Manzù’s name in order to flush out another, better-known designer.
To apply a legal verdict only available in the Scottish Courts, the case presented by Jerry Sloniger for Pio Manzù’s involvement appears to be ‘not proven’.
Epilogue
Writing some time in February 1968, Sloniger could have not imagined that both Luthe’s and Manzù’s careers would end abruptly, in the worst of circumstances.
Pio Manzù would only live another 15 months. On 26 May 1969, driving his wife’s 500C to a meeting at Fiat Centro Stile, he was killed in a collision near the Brandizzo exit on the Turin autostrada. He was only 30 years old.
The meeting he was to have attended had been set to select the design for the car to replace the ageing Fiat 850. Manzù’s design was chosen and, as the Fiat 127, stands as his most significant memorial. Apart from the millions produced worldwide from 1971 until as late as 1996, the influence of the car’s shape is evident in the Volkswagen Golf and Polo, Ford Fiesta and nearly all other small hatchbacks designed in the 1970s and 1980s.
Claus Luthe outlived NSU and the Ro80 by nearly 31 years, playing a major part in the irresistible rise of Audi to the ranks of the German premium brands. In 1976, he shocked his VAG masters by ‘crossing benches’ when he succeeded Paul Bracq as design director at arch-rival BMW.
He left his post at BMW after being accused of fatally stabbing his 33-year-old, chronically drug-dependent son, Ulrich after an argument on Good Friday in 1990. Luthe was eventually convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 33 months in prison, but was released before having to serve the complete sentence.
In the many good years before, he had risen to become a true grandee of the German automotive world, and an outstanding manager of designers, confounding Sloniger’s rather snobbish depiction as him as the low-born Facharbeiter made good, but lacking the talent to be capable of truly progressive and original design.
And poor lost Pio… Manzù was the golden boy cut off before his prime, a sort of Buddy Holly or Duncan Edwards of the automotive design world, who was set to take his place among the glorious group of design maestri born between 1937 and 1939; Giugiaro, Gandini, Fioravanti, and Spada who were all already establishing themselves as the foremost practitioners of their art.
Not that Pio Manzù considered car design to be an art, which is what sets him apart from his celebrated contemporaries in the automotive design firmament, as a star of a rather different chemistry. The sculptor’s son saw car design as no more than a branch of the wider discipline of shaping industrial products, and was emphatic in his view that industrial design and fine art were not cognate, but serve wholly different functions in the human experience.
Manzù was a prolific writer even in his early twenties, and a visionary whose ideas came to pass long after he was gone. He foresaw the future of cars as objects of utility, exemplified by the compact, affordable proto-MPV FAM, the more rigorously designed and appealing harbinger of the multitude of Scenics, Picassos, and Zafirae which would appear more than three decades later.
He also wrote of personal transport becoming part of an integrated system of human mobility, with manufacturers having a redefined role to provide this. Electric power and autonomous vehicles also featured in his visions of the future.
Not long after Sloniger’s article was published, Manzù became – all too briefly – a permanent part of Fiat’s establishment, an Agnelli protégé with his own studio and team at Centro Stile in Turin.
He even had a company Dino, a far more substantial and dynamically competent vehicle than the 500C he chose to use for that fateful drive from Bergamo to Turin. If he had surrounded himself with more metal, a 78 year old Pio Manzù might have been around to answer Sloniger’s speculation, and lay the half-century old rumours to rest.
Reference sources:
CAR: March 1968
Forty Years of Design with Fiat. Dante Giacosa. Automobilia srl; 1979
Pio Manzù: When the world was modern. Pietrantonio, Fagone, Finessi. Electa; 2008
NSU The Complete Story. Mick Walker. The Crowood Press 2009
Driven To Write 
A coupé Ro80, now there’s a thought…
http://www.ro80.nl/Nieuws/coupe-norway/coupe-norway.htm
See, this is why I read Driven To Write every day. Bravo!
Yes, a good link.
The c-pillar bothers me though.
I agree, great link to something I’ve never seen before.
It’s not the C-pillar itself that causes problems, but its implications on the rear windscreen. The original RO80 has a glasshause that sits flush on top of the lower body, but here the lower edge of the rear windscreen is offset upwards with regard to the side window. Thus, the bootlid sets on very high and drops towards the back. Seen from behind, the boot appears very high and bulky, which also makes the car look narrow.
Nevertheless, respect for the hours of work that went into a seemingly high-standard execution.
What an intriguing piece of history! I concur, this is why I read Driven to Write daily. Also, bonus points for the reference to the title. I may have been one of at most 47 people who has actually seen A Question of Attribution. Not the play, but the tv-film with James Fox and Prunella Scales. The Cambridge Five is a guilty pleasure of mine.
But more over to the question at hand. I want to point out something I’d like to call the artists touch. With every true artist they often have different call signs making their works intrinsically theirs. And both Manzu and Luthe are artistic enough that one could pinpoint a design to either one of them on looks alone. There are simply enough tell tales binding their separate works to see that they match their own record.
And I see a clear line of evolution of thought in Luthes work, from the Prinz to the Ro80 and K70, over to the Audi 50, to the BMW E28 and E30 facelifts, and the E32 7-series. He likes an upright look with a high and lofty centre section, and with a taut and nimb upright stance. There’s an extreme commonality in language between the Ro80 and the K70 if not in detail, there’s no question both cars are penned by the same hand. The Ro80 may be the most revolutionary of Luthes work, but taken as a whole his work output is more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Manzu is definitely the more revolutionary in his thinking, seeing the one box shape of the FAM and the Fiat City Taxi. He also works more in the Italian fashion sense of being a couturier, draping his cars like they were a tightly cut piece of velvet draped over the cars in the tautest possible way. There’s a clear line of thought from the Austin Healey to the 127 regarding how the metal is shaped and formed over the body, like an Italian fashionista. I’d say there’s a clear artist touch binding his output together, a touch that is unmistakably his.
On that presumtion alone, I would put the Ro80 being mostly a Luthe design more than it is not, so much I would actually give him sole credit for it. No matter how much work Manzu actually put in it, I don’t see enough of him in it to give him any credit for it. Sorry Manzu, you just have to let that one go. But he did so many other wonderful things all of that would be enough to give him a place in the car designers hall of fame.
This is really interesting. Looking at that rear-engined ’62 Ghia proposal shown above I see a good deal of what became Pininfarina’s ’67 Berlina Aerodynamica for BMC. (Or vice-versa) – another design over which there is a significant question of attribution.
The timelines here are compelling. It’s stated that Leonardo Fioravanti began work on this vehicle around 1964 and that his original theme was developed in conjunction with Paulo Martin at Pininfarina. According to his biog, Tom Tjaarda joined Pininfarina in 1961. His contract terminated at the end of ’63, but he re-joined the carrozzeria the following year, before departing again at the close of ’65. This places him at Pininfarina when Berlina Aerodynamica’s overall style was being firmed up and given the visual similarities (at least from the c-pillar forward) to the ’62 Ghia concept who’s to say he didn’t bring some of that thinking to the project?
What has this to do with the RO80? Looking again at Berlina Aerodynamica, there is a strong similarity especially in the treatment of the nose, but also in aspects of the glasshouse, even allowing for the NSU being a traditional three volume silhouette. And of course, both designs were first shown the same year.
So what am I suggesting? Merely that car design is a collaborative process, be that between sibling stylists within a design team, or outside consultants. There is a strong case to suggest the RO80 was a collaborative effort, rather than the vision of one man. Either way, Claus Luthe deserves great credit for marshalling and blending those efforts into what remains one of the defining car designs of the last 50 years. His later career demonstrated how capable he was of this – especially his work with Ercole Spada during the 1980’s at BMW.
I was actually referring to Robertas’s blog post, rather than the coupe link, but that’s great too.
Yeah, the article’s not too bad. Promising, very promising work.
Terrific stuff.
Now that’s what I call a comprehensive article. Well done indeed.
The Losanna seems derived from the 1960 Corvair Monza coupe with that long rear deck:
Yet it also has elements of the Mk 2 Corvair Monza coupe from 1965 , which itself seems to be unified from the Mk 1 by this Pininfarina take on the original from 1963:
Is this the Tom Tjaarda connection? He being from Michigan after all.
The grille treatment from the Losanna appears on the Ro80 to my eye. So I think the young fellow had nothing to do with it. This was Luthe at his derivative best absorbing influences he liked, and as Robert said the little NSU Prinz 4 1000 looked like a Corvair in dehydration mode. I always found the Ro80 ungainly with a huge amount of ground clearance at the rear wheels, repeated on the K70. Did we need to see the suspension trailing link? But I am no artist, I just react, and if I like, I like. When I saw that Losanna , the first thing that popped into my mind was Corvair coupe. I think the Corvairs’s details were better frankly, but the photos are blurry.
DTW comes through again. I now know things I never knew before. Being a design Philistine, I have to admit to not remembering the name of Luthe or Manzu, but I must have read them 50 years ago.
Great stuff.
Can anyone see Jaguar XJ-S in the front of the 1963 Pininfarina?
I can see what you’re getting at Richard, but I think it’s a little tenuous in this case. Overall however, I see a lot of Pininfarina in the XJ-S…
Sensational story, and not just a little bit intriguing. I s’pose any creative endeavour involving a team is going to be difficult to pin to one person, but this is a well presented case on behalf of Manzu. As for Luthe, it’s only now that I realise that he had a hand in every one of my all-time favourite BMW designs, even if it was “just” a facelift. On the subject, was their ever a more successful facelift than the E28?
Jaguar XJ Series III ? VW Passat B7? Fiat Ritmo… oh, hang on!
No, you’re right Kris. The XJ Series III wins. But they had Pininfarina’s help – it’s almost cheating!