01
Origins
Between styling Astons and Alfas, Zagato read the oil crisis and produced the Zele in 1974: a tiny, upright electric city car with a plastic body over a Fiat 500-derived platform, batteries under the floor and a range around 50 miles at little more than moped pace. It was decades premature and completely serious — sold in modest hundreds, including exports to America as the Elcar, and kept in the catalogue for years while the world declined to be ready. The famous carrozzeria thus holds an odd distinction: one of the few storied Italian design houses to have manufactured its own production EV, half a century before the industry's conversion. The Zele is easy to mock and hard to fault in hindsight; the joke, eventually, ran the other way.
1974 Zagato Zele · Vauxford · CC BY-SA 4.0
