Is De Tomaso back in business?
A group of Swiss investors has acquired the rights to the legendary De Tomaso brand and has promised that new Italian-built sportscars are on their way.
At the auction, held this week, the investors, through their company "L3 Holding," paid €2.05 million to snag the marque, which they said will once again be seen on the hoods of exotic cars. L3 Holding wants to be building 4,500 De Tomasos a year by the end of the decade and wants to build them in Turin, Italy.
Founded in 1959 in Modena, Italy, De Tomaso started out building race cars and for a while even owned Maserati but it is for two supercars -- the Mangusta, built from 1966-71, and the Pantera, which debuted in '71 -- that it has earned its legendary status.
Mangusta means Mongoose in Italian and the story goes that the name was chosen because of the creature's snake-based diet. The snake in question was the Shelby Cobra and the Mangusta used a similar recipe, a European chassis and a massive American V8 for power, but it upped the ante by turning to Carrozzeria Ghia, the Italian automotive design and coachbuilding studio, for its design, which featured gull wing doors on its trunk.
It was such a bold statement in terms of looks, handling and performance that Ford -- the company it was essentially trying to challenge -- went into partnership with De Tomaso for the encore, the Pantera.
Again designed by Ghia (which Ford had now acquired to style its own cars) and again powered by a big Ford V8, the Pantera was built in Italy but in the US at least was sold at Ford's Lincoln and Mercury dealerships as its own Italian American supercar.
But as wonderful as the car looked and no matter how incredible its performance figures (0-100kph in 5.5 seconds), build quality was questionable, lots of the initial cars had serious faults and by 1973, with the oil crisis looming, Ford brought the partnership to a premature halt. However that was still plenty of time for the Pantera to become infamous thanks to Elvis Presley. He'd bought one and become so frustrated with its eccentricities that he shot it one day when it wouldn't start.
The Pantera soldiered on, getting bigger and wider and sprouting spoilers and skirts as it got older, and finally ceased production in 1992. And in that time it went from being an irritant to being a much loved if temperamental classic supercar with a global owners club community and rapidly rising prices at collectors car auctions.
Despite its other business interests, including race car chassis and the Moto Guzzi motorcycle marque (which it owned until 1993), De Tomaso went under in 2004.
It looked like it had been saved, however, in 2008, when a former Fiat executive, Gian Mario Rossignol, bought the brand. He had ambitious plans for the reborn company and even brought a luxury crossover concept, the SLC, to the 2011 Geneva Motor Show. A year later, the company filed for bankruptcy again.
Let's hope that things are different this time. After all, Ford has resurrected its classic GT supercar for 2016, over in the UK a company is getting ready to re-launch a new car based on the classic 1960s Jensen Interceptor, and in Germany, plans are afoot to resurrect the equally legendary Borgward brand.
