Always a car to inspire pride of ownership, if the ads are anything to go by. SPECIFICATIONS Model: Volkswagen Passat 2.0TDi Price: from £19,000, on sale June Engine: 1,968cc, four cylinders, 16 valves, turbodiesel, 140bhp at 4,000rpm, 236lb ft at 1,750-2,500rpm Transmission: six-speed gearbox, front-wheel drive Performance: 128mph, 0-60 in 9.6sec, 44.8mpg official average CO2: 170g/km

SPECIFICATIONS Model: Volkswagen Passat 2.0TDi Price: from £19,000, on sale June Engine: 1,968cc, four cylinders, 16 valves, turbodiesel, 140bhp at 4,000rpm, 236lb ft at 1,750-2,500rpm Transmission: six-speed gearbox, front-wheel drive Performance: 128mph, 0-60 in 9.6sec, 44.8mpg official average CO2: 170g/km
The Volkswagen Passat. In 2000, 34 years after he passed away, he entered the Automotive News European Automotive Hall of Fame.Now, at last, the first Pininfarina car to be badged as such as a marque in its own right may be about to be born. In any case, with so many Chinese manufacturers approaching Pininfarina for styling, the idea of a Pininfarina designed car on every street in the world is getting closer all the time.. And Battista Farina himself doesn’t need actually to be around to keep on accumulating accolades. When he was alive, he received the Italian equivalent of a knighthood, honorary membership of London’s Royal Society of Arts and Turin’s Society of Engineers and Architects, and plaudits from the Turin Polytechnic which included “constantly renewed inventiveness” and “superb artistic talent”.

There have been more than 130 Fiat Group-Pininfarina joint projects.But there is little room for growth among Pininfarina’s traditional European customer base – Alfa Romeo and Peugeot now like to design their cars in-house. So Pininfarina altered the name of its Studi e Ricerche division to Pininfarina Ricerca e Sviluppo, to reflect the still family-controlled group’s shift from traditional design and manufacturing towards design, engineering and development. In October 2002, Pininfarina inaugurated its new Engineering Centre, where 500 design and engineering staff now work.This has attracted new clients such as Ford, which contracted Pininfarina to engineer and build its Streetka budget two-seater sports car, plus several new Chinese and Korean clients. There’s also a joint venture with Webasto, the German-domiciled Open Air Systems, which cements Pininfarina’s reputation as a folding-roof specialist on cars as diverse as the Peugeot 206CC and Bentley Azure.Still, what about sheer automotive beauty – that intangible quality on which the entire, thriving industrial edifice that is today’s Pininfarina was founded by Pinin Farina 75 years ago?A stream of new concepts sees that is maintained, and that Maserati at Geneva today is just the latest. From the Lancia Montecarlo to the Ferrari Testarossa, the Lancia Gamma coup?o the Fiat 124 Spider, Grugliasco’s body assembly halls were never idle. A portfolio of design-hungry clients was one thing: keeping the company’s industrial apparatus rolling was another. Actual designers were seldom credited; only when they left, as with Fioravanti, and also Paolo Martin – the stylist of the incredible Modulo show car of 1970 and later the Pininfarina-accredited Rolls-Royce Camargue, Peugeot 604 and Fiat 130 Coup? was the individual responsible finally revealed.The company weathered the 1970s and 1980s thanks, in large part, to the industrial benevolence of Fiat.

A brand new Design Centre opened in 1967 (which eventually spawned a separate design think-tank in 1982, the Centro Studi e Ricerche), and the Pininfarina brand became vital to the company. Ferrari styling became its calling card – we think of the many contrasting 250s and 500s, the Dino 246, Daytona and later 512BB and 400i. And yet the Grugliasco factory was a sports car sausage machine, squeezing out a Fiat 124 Spider, Alfa Romeo Duetto or Peugeot 504 convertible every few minutes.Sergio’s expansion focused on Pininfarina as a design hotbed. Indeed, rejected proposals for aerodynamic BMC cars, created by Pininfarina’s Leonardo Fioravanti in the late 1960s, exerted an extraordinarily powerful influence over the profiles of family car designs throughout the 1970s.You will notice, in the last paragraph, Pinin Farina changed to Pininfarina It’s no error. In 1961, the Italian government decreed that Battista Farina’s nickname and surname could be joined to form a new family surname and business trademark. It was a favour that recognised the founder’s gathering industrial importance and reputation in Italy and beyond.

But it must have taken some getting used to by Battista’s son Sergio (now) Pininfarina, the mastermind of the company’s industrialisation. He took command of Pininfarina six years later when, in April 1966, Battista died, aged 60.It rapidly became a different sort of Pininfarina. In 1951, Pinin’s brother Giovanni Farina closed its doors after 45 years.Car manufacturers beat a path to Pinin Farina’s door to plug into its creativity and compensate for their own design shortcomings. Pinin Farina’s carefully nurtured stable of designers and artists was available for hire.Our own British Motor Corporation was a frequent customer, beginning with the uncommonly neat Austin A40 in 1958 and progressing through the 1.5-litre and 3-litre saloon ranges a year later, and then the 1100 and 1800 cars. It called in Pinin Farina to sprinkle its design stardust over its conservative products. They began collaborating in 1951 and the first public result was the practical yet tasteful 403 saloon four years later.Both of these relationships were highly significant because they have endured for five decades As, of course, does the close co-operation with Ferrari.