LANCIA SIBILO

 

Marcello Gandini drew this in 1978 and it still looks like something from a decade that hasn't happened yet.

The Sibilo — Italian for hiss, or whisper — was built on a Lancia Stratos HF chassis, which means there's a Ferrari-derived V6 sitting mid-ship behind the driver. Bertone used the most violent rally car of its era as the skeleton for something that looks like it was designed to be fired out of a railgun.

The shape is total wedge. No unnecessary surfaces, no decorative relief. The whole thing tapers toward the front like it's permanently in motion. The greenhouse is a single canopy of glass that wraps back over the occupants and then just stops — no conventional roofline, no visible division between the windscreen and the sky. You don't sit inside it so much as you get sealed into it.

There are no side mirrors. Bertone replaced them with cameras feeding into monitors mounted inside the cabin — a decision that was genuinely decades ahead of regulation, and still isn't universal now. The instruments are fully digital. The steering wheel is a thin, almost vestigial ring grafted onto a dashboard that looks more like a control panel than anything you'd find in a car.

It debuted at the 1978 Geneva Motor Show and predictably went nowhere. Nobody was going to build this. That wasn't the point. The point was to draw the outermost edge of what a car could look like and park it in a convention hall for a week.

The retrofuturist thing people reach for now — that aesthetic of clean geometry, analogue materials trying to look digital, the future imagined from the inside of the 70s — this is a primary source. This isn't a car that evokes that feeling. This is where the feeling came from.

It just looks completely unhinged and I think about it more than I should.