From Scooter to Auto

After World War II, Ferdinando Innocefoti set out to put Italians on two wheels. From his plant near Milan, he began to roll two-passenger Lambretta motor scooters off the line for Italians looking for zippy but cheap (then $240, 100 miles per gallon) transportation. Now the world's No. 2 scooter producer (170,000 a year, behind Italy's Vespa), Ferdinando Innocenti has raised his sights to four wheels. Occasion: a deal to produce a Lambretta version of West Germany's four-passenger, four-wheel Goggomobil.

The deal was an open challenge from Innocenti, a portly, 66-year-old onetime plumber's helper, to Italy's midget-car giant, Fiat. It was Innocenti's second big challenge to Fiat. The first he won handily. He maneuvered Fiat out of its share of a joint Fiat-Innocenti contract to build a $342 million Venezuelan mine-to-mill steel complex on the Orinoco River to exploit a nearby mountain of high-grade (up to 60%) ore. Innocenti left Italy a year ago, planned to spend a few days looking into the Venezuelan prospects. The more he looked the better he liked what he saw; after five months he told the Venezuelan government that he could do a better job without Fiat, had a reported $30 million ready to go to work. Fiat agreed to yield its share of the contract to Innocenti in return for a 2% commission on Innocenti's net profit. Last week 100 Innocenti engineers were at work on the millsite in Venezuela, and the scooterman's machine-tool plant was busy producing steel sheet-rolling equipment.

Innocenti began mastering the intricacies of such quick-opening plays in 1935, when, still a plumber, he invented and patented a gadget for bolting vertical and horizontal sections of pipe together to form scaffolding. He made his first joints himself, soon had enough cash and orders to persuade bankers to back a factory. His factory turned out miles of pipe and thousands of joints for scaffolds, pontoon bridges, temporary grandstands. In World War II he switched from pipe to artillery shell production. At war's end he decided to turn his pipe into the framework of a motor scooter like the just-launched Piaggio & Co.'s Vespa (TIME, June 16, 1952). Last year Innocenti Corp. grossed $43 million from scooters, 6,000 of them exported to the U.S., earned another $19 million from pipes and machine-tools.

Innocenti's tubing will form the framework of the new Lambretta GoggomobiL He will have to dress it up for the Italian market, since Italians demand more flair in body style than the functional-minded Germans. But he still hopes to charge only $500 for his Lambretta Goggo, half the price of the cheapest Fiat.

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