Words by Maik Hahn / Photography by Bertone - Apr 20 2026

What It Means to Draw a Bertone Today: Inside the Runabout, GB110 and Bertone’s New Design Language

Between heritage and reinvention, Bertone’s latest chapter is less about nostalgia than about recovering clarity, restraint, and authorship in automotive design.

Some names in automotive history never fully disappear. They simply fall quiet for a while, waiting for the right moment, the right people, and the right product to make sense again. Bertone is one of those names.

For decades, Bertone stood for more than styling alone. It represented a particular kind of Italian design confidence: one that was capable of moving between production reality and pure imagination, between coachbuilding tradition and conceptual breakthrough. Cars such as the Miura, Countach and Stratos Zero helped define not just a studio, but an entire visual culture around the automobile. That legacy is powerful, but it is also difficult. The challenge today is not whether Bertone’s past is worth remembering. It is whether that history can still be translated into something credible in the present.

That question sits at the center of Bertone’s current chapter. Under its new ownership, the company has returned to building limited series cars of its own, with the GB110 and Runabout marking two very different but closely related statements of intent. For Andrea Mocellin, who has been involved with Bertone since 2022 and led the design of both cars, the task is not to invent a new identity from scratch, but to rebuild a design language that remains recognisably Bertone without turning into nostalgia. As he describes it, the work begins with respect: studying the history, understanding the DNA, and staying humble before the archive rather than treating heritage as surface decoration. Bertone, he says, is a brand that demands that kind of discipline, and the result should never feel trend driven. It should feel timeless.

That idea of timelessness matters because the wider industry has moved in the opposite direction. Many contemporary supercars are shaped not only by regulation and packaging, but by an increasing dependence on visual aggression. Performance is often communicated through noise, complexity and exaggerated surfaces. Andrea’s reading of Bertone pushes against that. In his view, Bertone historically did not follow trends. It led them. The objective with the GB110 was therefore not simply to produce another hypercar with enough drama to compete for attention, but to create something powerful without reducing it to fashion. The rear of the car had to express performance. The overall form still had to remain balanced, readable and premium over time. It had to carry force without becoming disposable.

That balance between engineering and design is one of the most revealing themes in the conversation. Andrea rejects the idea that one should win over the other. If engineering is absent, design becomes cosmetics. If design has no authority, the object loses emotional clarity. The aim, especially in a limited series car, is to build something luxurious and unique that also deserves to be driven. In that sense, Bertone’s current work is not about drawing shapes onto machines after the fact. It is about finding a form that feels inevitable once performance, architecture and purpose have been understood properly.

He returns repeatedly to one word: clarity. For Andrea, beauty in automotive design comes from taking something extremely complex and making it feel pure and immediately legible. That is what he admires in the great Bertone icons of the past. They were not memorable because they were merely radical. They were memorable because their radicalism was clear. They communicated what they were trying to be almost at first glance. They were shaped by engineering, proportion and ambition, but resolved into forms that felt simple enough to understand and strong enough to endure. That, more than any retro gesture, seems to be the real lesson Bertone is trying to recover.

Nowhere is that more visible than in the contrast between the GB110 and the Runabout. The former is organic, muscular and deliberately forceful. The latter is compact, geometric and reduced almost to the point of provocation. Yet Bertone does not present them as contradictions. They are two expressions of the same philosophy. The GB110 interprets Bertone heritage through broader references to the brand’s history of high performance forms. The Runabout works from a much more specific source: Marcello Gandini’s original 1969 concept. In Andrea’s telling, that gave the project a different kind of discipline. The car had to preserve the wedge, the nautical spirit, the compactness, the open architecture and above all the sharpness of its geometry, while still becoming a real road car rather than a showpiece.

That may be why the Runabout feels like the more revealing of the two projects. It does not only revive a name. It revives an attitude. Its light weight, compact packaging and reduced form all point toward a kind of luxury that has little to do with excess. Andrea speaks about lightness not only as a technical achievement but as a visual and conceptual one: a car that is reduced to essentials, where everything that remains feels necessary. In his words, the object should not feel overworked or overloaded. It should feel natural, as if every element belongs exactly where it is. Matteo, speaking from the brand side, pushes that idea further and frames lightness not simply as reduction, but as the point where design, performance, and joy of driving come together. In that reading, luxury is no longer defined by excess alone, but by the quality of the driving experience a car is able to deliver.

This is also where Bertone becomes more than a heritage story. The company’s return says something broader about the state of automotive design itself. Andrea is unusually candid about the pressures shaping major manufacturers today. Shared platforms, branding demands, market logic and compressed development cycles make it harder to create forms that feel singular and lasting. In that world, design often becomes a language of positioning rather than one of genuine invention. Coachbuilders and smaller manufacturers occupy a different space. Freed from some of those constraints, they can work with limited production, stronger authorship and a closer relationship between object and client. For Bertone, that is not just a romantic throwback. It is a practical argument for relevance.

That same logic extends to production numbers. Bertone is not trying to re enter the market through volume. The Runabout will be built in 25 units, the GB110 in 33. Rather than seeing those figures as limitations, Andrea describes them as part of the value of the project. Small numbers allow for a more intimate relationship with the owner, more attention to materials and finishes, and a product that feels genuinely personal. Matteo makes a similar point from a strategic perspective: Bertone’s future lies in offering something individual, design driven and emotionally legible to collectors who are looking for more than just another expensive machine.

What matters in the end is that Bertone’s present work does not ask to be judged by memory alone. The strongest point in Andrea’s comments is that even people with no deep knowledge of the brand’s history responded immediately to the cars when they were shown in Paris. They recognised that the objects were unusual before they necessarily understood why. Only afterwards did the larger story deepen that reaction. That is probably the clearest sign that Bertone is approaching its return in the right way. Heritage may open the door, but design still has to do the work on its own.

Perhaps that is what it means to draw a Bertone today. Not to imitate the past, and not to outrun the present through noise, but to recover something that the contemporary car industry often struggles to preserve: design clarity, emotional precision and the confidence to let a form speak before the explanation begins.