What Are Your Favorite Marcello Gandini Car Designs? (Here’s the Big List)

There's a lot more in Gandini's catalog than the Lamborghini Countach and Diablo. We tried to get as many in one list as we could here.

By Andrew P. Collins

Posted on Mar 14, 2024

Lamborghini

We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Learn more ›

Italian car designer Marcello Gandini passed away yesterday (March 13, 2024) at age 85. He leaves behind a mind-bogglingly deep catalog of contributions to automotive aesthetics. There’s no more fitting discussion for today’s question post than this: What are your favorite Marcello Gandini car designs?

I had to pluralize this prompt from “what’s your favorite” to “favorites.” While trying to expand my appreciation for Gandidi’s work, I realized he touched far more car designs than even what I thought were the deep cuts.

For me, the Lamborghini Diablo is a total basic-boy choice but I can’t deny it’s one of my faves. That was truly the supercar of my childhood and I will always love looking at those cars. But among the slightly lesser-known items, I think I have to call out the Alfa Romeo Navajo—a truly bonkers-looking space car that looks right out of the original Star Wars movie.

If you’re looking for a quick but neat contextualization of Gandini’s big designs, this video from LA’s Petersen Museum is a nice little piece:

Marcello Gandini’s Car Designs and Contributions

The most complete-looking list of Gandini’s production and concept car designs was on Wikipedia. I augmented the editable encyclopedia’s rundown and looked into the models that I hadn’t heard of. But I still have a feeling I might be missing a few. Interestingly, his obituary in the Italian publication La Repubblica mentions he “collaborated as an independent designer with car manufacturers such as Renault, Nissan, Toyota [and] Subaru” (translated from Italian) but I couldn’t readily find any other references to his work with those last two.

Not all cars on this list were the sole product of Gandini, of course. But here are the big ones he had his hands in. I strongly recommend you Google the ones you don’t know about—they’re all pretty wild.

Gandini was also known to have dabbled in architectural and interior designs, having supposedly worked on a nightclub interior, among other things. At the time of his passing, it’s said that he was still at work and planning to contribute to a training program at a car museum in Doha, Qatar.