History
Alfa Romeo contacted Giuseppe "Nuccio" Bertone of the Bertone design house in order to commission three concept vehicles with extensive research on the effects of drag on a vehicle. The idea was to create vehicles with the lowest possible drag coefficient. The cars were named BAT for "Berlinetta Aerodinamica Tecnica." All the cars featured large rear bumpers and curved fins, truly a unique design. They were built upon the Alfa Romeo 1900 chassis. Each year between 1953 and 1955 at the Turin Auto show, Bertone and Alfa Romeo presented a BAT concept, the BAT 5, 7 and 9.
The cars were successful in their goal, the best achieving a drag coefficient of 0.19, an achievement even by today's standards. For each of the cars, Alfa Romeo provided a five-speed gearbox and a powerful four-cylinder engine that produced more than 90 horsepower (67 kW), good enough to propel the car to a top speed of 125 mph (201 km/h). The three original BATs are currently on exhibit at the Blackhawk Museum in Blackhawk, California.
Read more about this topic: Alfa Romeo BAT
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)