Click above to view high-res gallery of the Fioravanti Hidra

Whether you consider Fioravanti to be innovative or strange depends on how you look at it. This year the Italian design house celebrates its 20th anniversary by unveiling the Hidra concept in Geneva. Like many of Fioravanti's previous concepts, the Hidra doesn't look like something we'd want to drive, but then maybe that's not the point.

Go back to 2001 when Leonardo Fioravanti, a former Pininfarina stylist who worked on such Ferrari designs as the Dino and Daytona, showed the LF concept. The design itself was attractive, but while Alfa Romeo wasn't likely to build it, the LF acted as a showcase for an innovative folding roof mechanism, which Ferrari used four years later on the Superamerica. The strange panoramic rear roof section on last year's Thalia concept, meanwhile, may not have won many hearts, but Fioravanti's back at it this year with the Hidra concept, which aims to demonstrate Fioravanti's glass-surface innovations. We'll give the Hidra 1,000:1 odds on ever seeing production, but its approach to windows may win the design studio some outsourcing work from a major manufacturer, work that's becoming increasingly hard to come by for design houses like Fioravanti. As for the Hidra itself, we'll have to get back to you next week when we see it in person.


[Source: World Car Fans]