The Cizet-Moroder V16T Story
Take a group of former Lamborghini engineers, led by a brilliant Ferrari dealer named Claudio Zampolli; team them up with a famous composer and record producer named Georgio Moroder, who had already won three Oscars and two Grammy awards; add into the mix a famous designer named Marcello Gandini, whose successes included the Lamborghinis Miua and Countach, several Maseratis and the Lancia Stratos; give them a brief to design and build the finest supercar ever made and how could they fail? Well they did, and spectacularly, too.
The Cizeta-Moroder made it's debut in 1991 and what a superb car it was. Built on a chrome-molybdemum elliptical steel tubing chassis this two door coupe was the world's first 16 cylinder car. They had installed not one but two Lamborghini V8 engines; these were mounted in a single block, with four cylinder heads. The power output was a massive 540 brake horsepower; sufficient to give a top speed of over 200 mph and a nought to 60 time of 4.5 seconds.
It's attraction wasn't confined to just the engine though. This was a beautiful supercar, designed by highly experienced experts and finished to a luxurious specification. Hardly surprisingly it wasn't cheap; in 1991 it was priced at about £200,000 but even this wasn't enough. Insufficient thought had been put into the costs involved in developing a supercar and massive losses started to add up.
Moroder's involvement seemed to have more for financial reasons than any other; he had a colourful lifestyle as a prolific and highly successful composer but pioneering electronic dance music was hardly a qualification for designing a supercar so it is perhaps not surprising that he left the company and the few cars that were manufactured and sold were named Cizeta V16T, with Moroder's name stripped out.
Yes it was a superb car and the company had ambitions to produce around one a week but even though they were losing money on every one produced the price was too high even for such a superb car as this. Indeed several of the very few that were sold went to the Royal family of oil-rich Brunei, who were amongst the very few who could spend that sort of money on a car in those days, no matter how advanced it was.
Perhaps it was the name however that had the greatest bearing on the failure of this car. If it had been badged as a Lamborghini or a Ferrari maybe there would have been more sales, with costs reduced by the economies of scale. As it was however there was apparently only about eight cars produced before the company went out of business, with perhaps another three finished off after it's demise.