Bertone, one of Italy’s legendary styling houses, is celebrating 75 years of collaboration with Alfa Romeo by showing the Pandion concept car at the Geneva Motor Show. It’s an aggressive yet stunning coupe designed as a tribute to Alfa Romeo’s one hundred year anniversary.

The Pandion is an extreme and controversial sports car in typical Bertone fashion. The size of the concept car (4620 mm in length, 1971 mm wide, 1230 mm high, 2850 mm wheelbase) offers a compact sports car external dimensions with a large sports car interior feeling, all powered by a 4.7 litre, 450 CV 8-cylinder Alfa Romeo engine.

The partnership between Bertone and Alfa Romeo dates back to the early 1930s and is one of the most famous partnerships in the history of car design due to its incisive draughtsmanship. These characteristics have been applied to 23 models, including one-offs and production cars constructed over the last 75 years.

The Pandion is the first car produced by Mike Robinson in his new role as Design and Brand Director at Bertone. A pure ‘dream car’, the Pandion takes its rightful place as a member of Bertone’s historic Alfa Romeo family: cars that have often been style icons, influencing the history of the automobile and Italian craftsmanship in their design quality.

The name comes from the animal world, as Pandion Haliaetus is the scientific name for an Osprey: a sea hawk that nests and lives in coastal areas. The designers, led by Mike Robinson, have drawn inspiration from the wings of this predator to invent the scissor door opening mechanisms, and from the hawks’ facial markings to project the traditional Alfa family feeling into the next era of design.

In almost a century of Bertone tradition, it is not the first time that natural wonders have inspired the names of concept cars. There was the Corvair Testudo (1963) and, by no coincidence, the Alfa Romeo Canguro (1964), Carabo (1968) and Delfino (1983).

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