GENEVA MOTOR SHOW: Italdesign ZeroUno Roadster revealed

Last year's Italdesign ZeroUno super-coupe made people love it or hate it.

Somehow, the roadster version of the Italian design house's supercar, due to be unveiled at next month's Geneva motor show, looks more organised and coherent than its hard-top brother.

It still has 42 (yes, 42) vents or intakes in its painted bodywork, not including the front splitter, the engine cover or the hot-air extraction areas on the tail.

Italdesign released a rear-three quarter sketch of the ZeroUno Roadster last week, and now the first images show a rear-end dominated by an enormous diffuser and wide, slim exhausts at the bottom and a fixed, carbon-fibre spoiler at the top.

The brand's 50th birthday car, the ZeroUno Roadster will be sold for close to €2 million, with Italdesign following its coupe strategy by essentially making just five customers pay for its concept car development and production.

That price tag will make it considerably more expensive than last year's ZeroUno, which sold for €1.5 million each. All of those cars have been built already and sold through its Automobili Speciali division.

Like the Coupe, the real job of the Roadster is to attract customers to Italdesign that are far more critical to the brand's success than individual collectors.

CEO Jörg Astalosch expects the Roadster will showcase the company's design, engineering and development abilities, all of which are for hire to car-makers around the world, despite Italdesign being wholly owned by the Volkswagen Group.

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

The blue Roadster will be based around the aluminium spaceframe of the Audi R8, complete with its carbon-fibre reinforcing around the rear of the passenger compartment and over the transmission tunnel.

It will use the complete powertrain of the R8 Plus, 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, which is almost precisely in line with the R8 Plus that donates its innards to the project, and the Roadster will be broadly similar in performance.

It will swing up to 449kW of power at 8250rpm from its 5.2-litre naturally aspirated engine, which can keep revving out to 8700rpm.

Its torque peak of 560Nm isn't outstanding in the turbo sportscar era, and it arrives at 6500rpm, and it drives all four wheels through a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission.

The Roadster rides on double wishbones all round, governed by magnetically variable adaptive dampers and its brake rotors are carbon-ceramic, surrounded by one-off forged alloy wheels.

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.

Italdesign was founded near Turin by designer Giorgetto Giugiaro and engineer Aldo Mantovani in 1968. It has designed or engineered (or both) cars like the original Volkswagen Golf, plus the Fiat Panda, Alfa Romeo Alfasud, BMW M1, Lancia Delta, Lamborghini Gallardo, Alfa 159, Audi Q2 and the 2008 MINI hatch.