The Italian Consul in Detroit Paola Allegra Baistrocchi, left, CEO of Pininfarina Silvio Angori, middle, and Italian Ambassador, Mariangela Zappia, right, during the Detroit Auto show on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023.
The Italian Consul in Detroit Paola Allegra Baistrocchi, left, CEO of Pininfarina Silvio Angori, middle, and Italian Ambassador, Mariangela Zappia, right, during the Detroit Auto show on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023.
DETROIT, Sept. 14, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — (LaPresse) Italy has been a main protagonist on the opening day of the Detroit Auto Show 2023. “Italy is synonymous with automotive”, underlined the Italian consul in Detroit, Allegra Baistrocchi, who organized the Italian presence as part of the Mobility Global Forum, a two-day symposium attended by managers and experts in the sector to discuss changes in the world of mobility and transport.
The long ties between Detroit and Italy, recalled the ambassador to the United States, Mariangela Zappia, date back to 1899, the year of the first edition of the Auto Show. That same year, Italy sent its first consular agent to Detroit. “It is no coincidence that Turin and Detroit are sister cities”, said Zappia, recalling the “numerous Italian companies present in the city”. And certainly, “the merger between Fiat and Chrysler”, which then helped give life to Stellantis, one of Detroit’s ‘Big Three’. “Innovation, performance and sustainability are the strengths of Italian automotive production”, with a sector that has over 5,500 companies and over 250 thousand employees, and is one of the flags of the entire Italian economy, the fifth manufacturing country in the world, Zappia said.
One of the ‘key speakers’ of the Mobility Global Forum, the CEO and managing director of Pininfarina, Silvio Angori, spoke about design, underlining the need to maintain “independent design studios”, for the benefit of existing car manufacturers and future ones, to imagine products that are not only “beautiful”, but also sustainable. “A beautiful design is an attribute that a product must necessarily have. A product that is beautiful will sell. But it must also be sustainable” and to do this, Angori explained, the product must be “simple”. A quality from which we have “distanced ourselves a little” and which “we must recover”.
Stefano dePonti, CEO of Dallara USA, another flagship of the Italian industry, spoke about the contribution that the world of racing can make to the sustainability of the ‘car product’. “In the United States we design and produce all the chassis for the Indy 500 and the IndyCar series,” he recalled. “Racing is a great testing ground”, also in terms of the design and development of “new materials with a view to sustainability”. For this reason, “there is a continuous exchange of information between the automotive world and the racing world,” dePonti said.
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