PROJECT

The company Ferrero invests in innovation: Nutella was a postwar substitute for real chocolate, cups instead of jars were supposed to help the poverty stricken Italian households; the Kinder egg surprise was the marketing and technological experiment of Michele Ferrero, an educated nuclear physicist, who invented the first refrigerated container ship for the transportation of chocolate. The project of constructing a small recreational buggy involved placing four independent electric motors in the wheel hubs instead of one combustion engine; all four wheels were to be steerable to ease parking; a modest exterior design, urban in feel with a comfortable interior for a single occupant – such as elderly lady relaxing on Capri.

STRATEGY

A prototype was created, but it is unknown whether it gained approval for road use. Janusz Kaniewski perceived the collaboration as such – 'for a few months every day, a black Mercedes would come to me in Turin from Alba (a distance of almost one hundred kilometers), drive me those hundred kilometers to a dinner party in the Piedmont basin of good food and wine, where I would spend a few hours in a restaurant among the venerable founding fathers of the company. At the end of the said dinner, some of the more gray-haired heads would fall asleep with cheese and digestive, while a motorcade would drive to inspect the day’s progress on the prototype in the workshop. At the end of all this the black Mercedes would drive me home. Each day I was paid 250 Euros. It was the most satisfying and least productive time of my life. There is a place on Earth: the island of Capri. Virtually inaccessible to cars, inhabited by taxi cabriolets with canvas roofs and wicker chairs, built on a Fiat base spanning the whole of the twentieth century - from the pre-war 508 through the 1300s of the sixties to the Marea Weekend (but with the truncated roof!) of the nineties. I am sure that my prototype - if it actually drives – will join this group…'.