Pininfarina Wins Louis Vuitton Classic Concept Award

Press Release

An year of successes around the world for the concept car developed by Pininfarina in collaboration with Motorola and Maserati.

The assignment of the prestigious Louis Vuitton Classic Concept Award marks the end of a fantastic year for the Maserati Birdcage 75th, a prototype developed by Pininfarina to celebrate its 75 years of business, reviving the storied theme of the dream car and seamlessly integrating exclusive design, sports DNA and technological innovation.

The Birdcage 75th carried off the elite Louis Vuitton Award, assigned to the maximum expression functioning prototype amongst those presented at the major international Motor Shows during the year, for the following reason: “Celebrating the cooperation between Maserati, Motorola and Pininfarina, the Birdcage 75th is both a concept car incorporating state of the art technologies, and a dream car as they were imagined in the Sixties”.
The Pininfarina prototype has beaten the concurrence of the following concept cars: Bertone Villa, Citroën C Sport Lounge, Ford Iosis, Italdesign-Giugiaro GG50, Lexus LFS, Mazda Senku, Maybach Exelero and Renault Zoë.

The prize, gathered at the special Louis Vuitton House in the Champs-Elysées, has been handed over to Ken Okuyama Pininfarina Design Director with the Chief Designer Lowie Vermeersch and the designer Jason Castriota.

At its debut at the 2005 Geneva Motor Show, this extraordinary prototype already awarded the “Best Concept” prize of the Editors’ Choice Awards assigned by Autoweek, the leading American car magazine, with the following motivation: ”Birdcage 75th is pure unadulterated passion. The Pininfarina concept car also embodies the spirit of the Geneva Show. Birdcage 75th is precisely what Americans expect from an independent design house such as Pininfarina which has now become a myth”.

In October 2005, the International Jury of the “L’Automobile più Bella del Mondo” award assigned the Birdcage 75th a Special Award for the quality of the concept car motivating this as follows: “With this Maserati, Pininfarina, reviving a famous model of the early Sixties of the Tridente, imposes its commanding, future-looking innovative style”.

“These important awards emphasize the extraordinary capabilities of Pininfarina not only in the creative field, but also show the perfect integration in a complicated project such as the construction of a running prototype” concludes Andrea Pininfarina CEO Pininfarina.