Some Design Students Finally Fixed The Pagani Zonda’s Terrible Shape

Ever since the Pagani Zonda made its debut at the Geneva Motor Show back in 1999, I’ve been trying to understand why people think it looks good. Built to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the original Zonda, the Istituto Europeo di Design put together this gorgeous flowing conceptual update to the long-serving Zonda, dubbed Alisea.

From the weird beady little eyes to the spindly rear view mirrors and angular sharpness everywhere, the original Pagani has always been an enigmatic and unspectacular shape. Obviously the Zonda is a technological marvel of speed, and every detail of the car’s construction is pored over with hand-built perfection, but I’ve always seen it as an eyesore. The Alisea is damn near perfect.

Where the Zonda is disjointed and incomplete, the Alisea looks finished and refined. This is a car that continues its sweeping elegance from front to back, but does so in a way that maintains the svelte minimalism of the Zonda without resorting to the bulky and ineffective lines of the Huayra or Utopia. Someone really needs to take the design pen out of Horacio’s hands. Let him work on the technical side, where he excels, but his shapes are completely out of control.

Alisea was a thesis project put together by a group of 24 design students taking the Master Course in Transportation Design at IED Torino. They deserve recognition for this work, and hopefully their expertise will be pushed into car design for the next handful of decades around the globe. Keep an eye on these names, I think they’re going to go far.

Andrea Boffa (Italy), Enrichetta Maria Borsano (Italy), Ludwig Brenninkmeijer (Netherlands), Daria Butenko (Russia), Andrea Caibugatti (Italy), Joan De La Plata Perich (Spain), Mausam Pramod Dhande (India), Aayush Dutta (India), Sharang Kulkarni (India), Txomin Munitxa Arrinda (Spain), Yash Vishnubhai Panchal (India), Simon Rapisarda (Australia), Hariprasad Uthaman Chukkasseri (India), Jayakrishnan Anandan (India), Sara Cancelli (Italy), Pablo Alejandro Hidrobo Lapuerta (Ecuador), Pritish Karmi (India), Tomas Knaze (Slovakia), Vaibhav Krishna (India), Ya-Hsin Liu (Taiwan – Formosa), Luis David Parra Rubio (Mexico), Davide Patruno (Italy), Jincheng Tian (China), Rongning Xue (China).

The project was supported by OZ Racing, Pirelli, and Lechler.

Alisea proves that Horacio Pagani was on the right track with the Zonda all those years ago, but it just needed a bit more tweaking to be this good. Maybe it wouldn’t have been possible to achieve true design greatness at all with 1999 eyes. With 25 years of tweaks Pagani designs have gotten worse, but these students managed to boil it down to the basics, and kick ass in the process.

Many of the Zonda’s signature design pieces are carried over, including the central four-exit exhaust at the back, the spindly mirror stalks protruding from the A-pillars, forward-focused cockpit, and bulging front wheel arches. It’s unmistakably a Pagani, without making the same design mistakes of the original.

Everything that I couldn’t figure out about the Zonda has been brought into stark focus when directly compared to Alisea. I love her. I would walk through hell for her.