Italdesign Capsula

The Italdesign Capsula is a 1982 concept car by the Italian design house Italdesign, shown at the Turin Motor Show and credited to Giorgetto Giugiaro. It explored extreme modularity: a compact self-contained chassis carried the front-mounted Alfa Romeo engine and gearbox, suspension, fuel tank, brakes, wheels and lamps, with luggage space between the wheels reached through small bus-style doors. The passenger compartment was a separate capsule applied to that chassis, so the same platform could in principle become a delivery van, school bus, fire truck, ambulance or a tropical canvas-sided version. The showcar itself was a five-seat monospace with a flat floor, gullwing doors and a body of epowood and fibreglass in five sections. At 3720 mm long it offered more interior room than a first-generation Volkswagen Golf, according to the sources, and it followed Italdesign's earlier space-efficiency studies, the 1976 New York taxi and the 1978 Lancia Megagamma.