GEORG KACHER
A very Italian revolution is happening at Lancia, led by the Pu+Ra HPE concept
While the big-name brands like Fiat, Peugeot, Dodge and Jeep are the cornerstones of the ambitious plans of Carlos Tavares and his Stellantis team, hidden crown jewels in the shape of Alfa Romeo, DS and Lancia are yet to be brought into the open and given their time to shine.
The three upmarket brands have been grouped together into a still fragile and underfunded group called the Premium Cluster. Why bother with Lancia instead of pulling out all the stops at Alfa? Because while car makers can buy batteries, microchips, tyres, steel and paint readily enough, tradition, heritage and history are not so easily acquired. You either have it or you don’t, and Lancia happens to possess it in bulk.
Trouble is, the heyday of the former style and tech leader is long gone. Customers craving the latest trends have a short memory, and Lancia has been a shadow of its formerly glorious self for so long that the name means nothing, or nothing good, to a lot of people. Under the Fiat umbrella, self-declared experts decided that cars like the Fulvia, Montecarlo, Stratos and Delta Integrale no longer matched the image, which had been in a constant state flux since the ’90s.
As it became more intertwined with Alfa Romeo, Lancia was forced to focus on a luxurious rather than sporty image, and we all know how that ended. The road to oblivion was paved with disasters like Lybra, Kappa, Prisma, Gamma, Zeta and Delta III. But the true nadir came when the brand fell prey to Chrysler, a tragic fate which produced a series of shameful caricatures like Flavia, Thema III and Voyager. The one model that remained true to its original mission throughout its lifetime was the Ypsilon, now built in Poland on an ancient Fiat-Ford platform but still ranking among the three best-selling small cars in Italy.
The new term being thrown around is Italianitá, which is about flair, emotion and a positive gut feeling. And it all started with the radical Pu+Ra HPE concept revealed earlier this year.
It’s certainly bold, with a wedge shape clearly influenced by the Stratos but pushed to an extreme that could easily be polarising. Inside, the outlandish user interface is too sophisticated for its own good. The driver environment is fully digitised, with one eye on eventually becoming self-driving, and looks more like a high-end living room than the cockpit of car.
‘All the cues of our new design DNA are already in place – the T-pattern front-end graphics, the trad round tail lights, the flush large-diameter whe
