Giugiaro will present a new concept in Geneva that evolves the Italian designer's alternative fuelled high powered sports car theme of recent years and which the firm is already dubbing as the fastest hybrid in the world.

An image has leaked onto the internet this weekend, showing a very sharp, angular supercar with plenty of traces of the Quarantra project's styling theme. There is little information as yet released by the Italian design house which last year celebrated its 40th anniversary; the website merely announces a press conference to be held at 10:35 AM on March 3 to unveil the car with the tagline "the fastest hybrid in the world". This is along with one teaser shot posted on the website. The leaking of this image onto the internet his weekend though does negate the traditional - and somewhat tiresome - sequence of glimpsing the car bit-by-bit through a series of 'teaser' images.

This latest concept is the continuation of a broad theme that has seen Giugiaro pursing advances in the area of alternatively fuelled high performance sports cars. At the Geneva show in 2004 the hybrid-powered Toyota Volta concept was unveiled, and again in Geneva two years ago he showed off VAD.HO, a concept that used BMW V12 hydrogen power, and unusually seated the occupants behind each other.

Last year the Quarantra concept, which evolved from the Volt project four years earlier, showcased Toyota's latest incarnation of its Hybrid Synergy Design, being with a 3.3-litre V6 engine that operates in tandem with two electric motors that gives comparable performance to an 8-cylinder engine. Despite this, fuel economy and emissions are lower than that of a 4-cylinder engine. To improve efficiency and handling the intelligent E-Four system chooses whether to select two- or four-wheel-drive options. As with the Volta, the Quarantra proposes to seat three passenger across the cockpit.