GENEVA MOTOR SHOW: Italdesign sketches ZeroUno roadster

Legendary Italian design and engineering house Italdesign will celebrate its 50th birthday by taking the roof off its Zerouno sports car at the Geneva motor show in early March.

It released a sketch of the Zerouno Roadster yesterday at its headquarters near Torino and plans to put five of the cars into private hands for at least €1.5 million ($A2.36m) each.

It won't be the only car concept Italdesign will show in Geneva, though, with plans to deliver an evolution of its Airbus collaboration, the Pop.Up, with its a passenger cell that attaches to either a detachable rolling chassis or a drone-style aircraft.

The Zerouno's frantically busy design polarised opinion when it debuted at the same show last year, the entire point of the car was to draw attention to Italdesign's engineering and ultra-low volume production capability.

Italdesign CEO Jörg Astalosch yesterday insisted the Zerouno (Zero one in English) brought a raft of interest and new customers the Volkswagen Group-owned organisation.

It also sold all five of its $2.4m Zerounos to private collectors and Astalosch expects to move its five Roadsters the same way, via its Automobili Speciali branch.

"We will have two cars for Geneva and one of them is a Roadster version of Zero Uno, with a targa top.

"Last year we presented Zero Uno coupe, built and sold five of them. This year we will have the Roadster version."

Like the Coupe, Astalosch expects the Roadster to attract more car-makers to Italdesign, all while its development and production is completely paid for by its five collectors.

The radical-looking Roadster will, like its hard-topped predecessor, be based around the core spaceframe aluminium/carbon-fibre chassis and powertrain of the 5.2-litre V10 Audi R8.

Italdesign claimed last year's Coupe would run to 100km/h in 3.2 seconds on its way to a 330km/h top speed. The two-seat convertible is likely to have a similar 4847mm overall length and 1970mm width to the Coupe, and is likely to have a similar 1204mm height, too.

Founded by design legend Giorgetto Giugiaro and engineering lynchpin Aldo Mantovani in 1968, Italdesign has designed or engineered (or both) cars like the original Volkswagen Golf, Fiat Panda, Alfa Romeo Alfasud and 159, BMW M1, Lancia Delta, Lamborghini Gallardo, the 2008 MINI hatch and the Audi Q2.