Italdesign Zerouno convertible to be showcased at Geneva

Italdesign will showcase a convertible variant of its Zerouno supercar at the Geneva motor show next month. It had earlier debuted in coupé form and the Italian design house, part of the Volkswagen Group, had sold all five examples of the car.

The brand has now shown a murky image of a drop-top version, suggesting that it has bowed to demand from customers to produce more examples of the supercar.

The supercar has a 5.2-litre V10 petrol engine shared with the top-end versions of the Audi R8. It also adopts Audi’s quattro permanent four-wheel-drive system. Top speed is estimated at 330kph and the 0-100kph acceleration time will be just 3.2sec. The car, which measures 4.87m in length overall, can also be used on normal roads.

The body features a prominent front splitter, louvres over the wheel arches to relieve air pressure, side-mounted fins and a racing-style rear spoiler that works in conjunction with a large underbody diffuser to tune the car’s high-speed aerodynamics.

The body panels are made entirely of carbon fibre and the car is expected to have a kerb weight that will undercut Volkswagen Group’s other V10-engined supercar models, the R8 and the Lamborghini Aventador, which weigh 1,595kg and 1,575kg, respectively.

The Zerouno's engineers revealed little about the provenance of their new car’s underpinnings, confirming only that it uses “a modular chassis in carbonfibre and aluminium”.