All 3 Alfa Romeo BAT Concept Cars
There are few, if any, concept car series as famous as the Alfa Romeo BAT trifecta – three one-off cars penned by the legendary Franco Scaglione and built by Carrozzeria Bertone between 1953 and 1955.
The “BAT” acronym stands for “Berlina Aerodinamica Tecnica”, in Italian the word “Berlina” is used to described a sedan with a fixed roof, so the full translation for the name would be something akin to “Technical Aerodynamic Sedan”.
One of his earliest designs to be made real was the Scaglione-designed and Bertone-built Abarth 1500 Biposto in 1952, it would be this car that would lead to Alfa Romeo commissioning the BAT cars – each of which would be built on the Alfa Romeo 1900 platform.
The first to be built would be the BAT 5 of 1953 (black). Scaglione threw himself into his work, he disregarded established concepts of automobile design and focussed instead on the minimization of drag of shaping laminar airflow.
In 1954 Scaglione and Bertone got to work on the second car in the series, the BAT 7 (blue). For this car Scaglione was given free-reign to further develop the preceding car which is exactly what he did.
The design of the Berlina Aerodinamica Tecnica 7 was both more extravagant and more aerodynamic than the earlier car, with a coefficient of drag of just 0.19. This compares favourably with modern aerodynamic cars like the Toyota Prius with its coefficient of drag of 0.24 Cd.
The final car in the series would be the BAT 9d (grey), Alfa Romeo’s mandate for this concept was to “make it more practical for road use”. It’s important to note that all three of the BAT vehicles is road legal, but Alfa Romeo wanted a design study that could potentially be daily driven.
he Berlina Aerodinamica Tecnica 9d would feature fixed headlights, smaller fins for better rearward visibility, the rear wheel skirts were eliminated, the passenger compartment was wider and more spacious, and the car featured a more traditional Alfa Romeo grille up front.
Each of these three cars caused a sensation upon their release but as was often the case with concept cars of the era they were all sold into private hands shortly after their show circuit was completed. As it happened all three ended up in the United States and all were used on the road to varying degrees – BAT 9d was bought by a young medical student who used it as his daily transportation while attending medical school.