Bertone A112 Runabout

Autobianchi A112 Runabout at a glance

The Runabout was Bertone's answer to a business problem. The coachbuilder assembled the Fiat 850 Spider at its Grugliasco plant near Turin, that car was ageing, and proposed US rollover rules threatened open cars of the traditional kind. Bertone needed a new small sports car to build, and the Runabout was its pitch.

The name came from the Autobianchi A112, the small front-wheel-drive hatchback that Autobianchi, a Fiat-controlled brand, launched in the same autumn of 1969. Gandini styled both. In English a runabout is a small motorboat, and the car was meant to look like one.

Speedboat design: waterline, roll bar and hidden lamps

The body has a long, flat nose with a central indentation and an inset Autobianchi badge, and almost no rear overhang. A sharp crease runs along the whole flank like a boat's waterline, with white paint above it and a metallic finish below. The tail is cut off square, like a boat's transom, with the black engine cover on top.

The most unusual feature is the roll bar. It leans forward over the cabin like the radar arch on a racing boat and carries the headlamps in its lower legs, behind the seats rather than in the nose. A low wind deflector replaces a full windscreen, and there are no doors: the occupants step over the sill.

Gandini drew round, slightly flared wheel arches over wide, low tyres and deep-dish wheels, but none of the cut rear arches he used on many other designs. The hexagonal seat shapes recall his Lamborghini Marzal of 1967. The dashboard is tiny, with a single central speedometer styled like a ship's compass.

The Fiat 128 engine behind the seats

Despite the Autobianchi name, the mechanical parts did not come from the A112, which used a 903 cc overhead-valve engine of 31 kW (42 PS) at the front. The Runabout used the newer 1,116 cc single-overhead-camshaft engine of the Fiat 128, designed by Aurelio Lampredi, who had joined Fiat from Ferrari. With an aluminium cylinder head and a belt-driven camshaft, it was a modern unit for 1969, producing about 40 kW (55 PS).

Bertone placed the engine transversely just ahead of the rear axle, the layout Lamborghini had used for the Miura. The fuel tank and the spare wheel sat behind the cabin on either side of the engine, which balanced the weight and left room for luggage at both ends. Published accounts disagree about the gearbox: some list a four-speed manual, others a five-speed.

Bertone built its show cars as drivable prototypes rather than clay models, and the Runabout was no exception. The old 1cars text claimed a 1.3-litre engine; that size belongs to the production X1/9, not to the concept.

From concept to the Fiat X1/9

Gianni Agnelli saw the Runabout and approved a production car based on it. Bertone's design team, again led by Gandini, adapted the idea into a mid-engined targa with a removable roof panel, and the Fiat X1/9 was presented to the press in Sicily in late November 1972. Its launch had been moved away from the Turin show so that it would not overshadow the new Fiat 126.

The X1/9 kept the Runabout's main ideas: the transverse Fiat engine ahead of the rear axle, a fuel tank and spare wheel between cabin and engine, and luggage space at both ends. Fiat built about 140,500 cars until 1982 and Bertone about 19,500 more until 1989; roughly two-thirds went to North America. The X1/9 weighed about 880 kg dry with the 1.3-litre engine and 920 kg with the 1.5. By our calculation that is 16 kg per kW for the first car and about 14.6 kg per kW for the 1500, figures you can set against modern roadsters in the power-to-weight calculator. Bertone's later work is covered in the history of Bertone, and Fiat's in the history of Fiat.

Some historians also point to Fiat's own G31 prototype of 1969 and to the strikingly similar De Tomaso 1600 Spider of 1971 as part of the X1/9 story, but the Runabout is the car most often named as its starting point.

Influence on the Lancia Stratos

The Runabout's wedge proportions and its pointed, low nose fed into Gandini's later work for Lancia. Design historians see a strong influence on the Lancia Stratos HF of the early 1970s, from the prototype to the production rally car. There is a human link too: Mike Parkes, who built the first racing X1/9 for Scuderia Filipinetti, later worked on the development of the Stratos.

Where the Runabout is today

The car survived in Bertone's own collection. When the Bertone company collapsed, the Automotoclub Storico Italiano (ASI) bought the collection in September 2015, and the Runabout has belonged to the club since then. In August 2022 it was shown in the Postwar Preservation class at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, where it received the Gran Turismo award chosen by Kazunori Yamauchi, the creator of the video game series.

The original is not for sale, and no price can be given for it. A production X1/9 is the realistic way to own the idea; you can browse other cars of the period in the classic cars section and the best classic cars of the 1960s.

The Bertone Runabout revival

The Bertone name returned in the 2020s as a maker of limited-series cars, and it chose the Runabout as the first model of its Bertone Classic range. The new car is a neo-retro reading of the 1969 shape, offered as a barchetta and as a targa, limited to 25 cars. It uses a mid-mounted supercharged 3.5-litre V6 from Toyota with 349 kW (468 bhp), a six-speed manual gearbox, a claimed 0–100 km/h time of 3.1 seconds and a top speed of almost 170 mph (about 270 km/h). The engine sits in the same place as in the original, but with more than eight times the power.