Italian Design House Fioravanti will present a highly innovative Fiat Grand Punto based 'convertible/pickup' concept car at the Geneva Motor Show later this month. This new concept car uses the Italian firm's unique folding roof technology, which was first seen in full production use in the limited-edition Ferrari Superamerica last year, with the addition of a folding tailboard that will allow the car to also act as a pick-up.

Fioravanti's innovative one-piece folding roof has a five-year development history. It was first presented at the Geneva Motor Show back in 2001 on a stylish Alfa Romeo concept car, which was known as the Vola, developed around an original yet innovative concept of open sports-car. A Fioravanti Patent, the feature immediately raised a lot of interest with many car manufacturers thanks to its simplicity. Given the tight relationship binding Fioravanti and Ferrari for more than forty years, the priority in production of this innovative component was taken up by Ferrari for its limited-edition Superamerica.

Derived from the Ferrari 575 M, the Superamerica become first production car in the world to be equipped with the new Fioravanti rotating sun roof. It is particularly light thanks to its lightweight carbon fibre structure, and it opens and closes in exactly ten seconds, activated via a switch which is located on the front console. While open, the roof lies flush upon the bootlid, leaving the load capacity unchanged, and thanks to the shape of the rear window, it also acts as an anti-turbulence wind-breaking device. The roof is also equipped with electro-chromatic technology so to allow transparency variations. For high performance cars such as Ferraris there is also another feature of interest in the Fioravanti roof: its minimal gap barycentre change between the open and the closed positions.
 

The Ferrari Superamerica was first presented to receptive audiences at the Los Angeles and Detroit Auto Shows in January 2005. Now Fioravanti hope - with the exciting new Grande Punto - to demonstrate that this technology can have a much wider higher-production application. The Grande Punto, which made it public debut last September at the Frankfurt IAA, is the model which is now driving Fiat's Auto Division forward into a new future. With an order book already in the six-figure region, Fiat expect to sell more than 360,000 of the 'compact' category models this year.

Just as Fiat have - very successfully - revived a tradition of producing diverse variants on the central theme with the smaller Panda, so they are now gearing up to build differing offspring for the Grande Punto. With the huge recent market surge in popularity of cars built on the 'folding-roof' 'Coupé-Convertible' (CC) theme, with this innovative new concept car Fioravanti believe they are demonstrating that their technology can in the near future make a valuable contribution to the new supermini's product lifecycle, but in a way that is much more cost-effective and visually-pleasing than the bulky and cumbersome first-generation CC breed.