Italdesign Biga

The Italdesign Biga is a small city car concept shown at the 1992 Turin Motor Show, developed from a design Giorgetto Giugiaro submitted in 1989 to the Assises Mondiales de l'Automobile in Paris on the theme of what cars the year 2000 should have. Italdesign presented it as a realistic, mass-producible and eco-friendly answer to town traffic, and as part of a wider traffic-management scheme: a personal card recorded in a database would let a user take a Biga from a designated parking space and leave it at another. The body is a cube of special steels about 2 metres long and one and a half metres wide, entered through a single rear tailgate like a Roman chariot and with no side doors, so Bigas can park side by side. It seats a driver and three passengers, or a driver and one passenger in a wheelchair. A hybrid system of a small diesel engine coupled with an alternator supplies energy to the batteries for traction. Za Rulem magazine described the engine as a 250 cc direct-injection diesel.