“Everyone told me it was impossible to do that, but our engineers didn’t know it was impossible. And they did.” The famous phrase with which Andrea Pontremoli, CEO of Dallara, likes to describe the way in which the world’s most advanced driving simulator was born in 2011 has now become a motto, an aphorism on the way innovation is done in Italy .
The courage to accept industrial challenges that others have dismissed. The ability to see products when no one has thought of them yet. The inventiveness of combining what exists to obtain what does not exist. Gestures that our entrepreneurs have inherited from an artisan culture and which they reproduce in highly industrialized contexts. And they do it as pioneers from the future, every time they see the possibility of advancing a technology, overcoming a frontier, revolutionizing an industrial sector. As is happening with the electric car revolution.
Overwhelmed by Dieselgate, in 2015 the global car industry accelerates towards electricity. A race that for Europe has a horizon of 2035: the year from which the old continent aims to register only battery-powered cars.
From Dieselgate onwards, the car industry has been attracted by Made in Italy: there is no car brand involved in the production of electric cars or its supplier that has not come to Italy. To then return home with products and technological solutions that simply did not exist before.
Italian ideas and technologies that today move the electric car around the world, born within exceptional companies. Stories of pioneers and innovators, such as those now collected in the book «Electric car. The Italy that is not afraid of 2035» (on newsstands with Il Sole 24 Ore from Saturday 8 April, ndr).