The car in China, compared to Europe, has financial strength and strategic energy
The Europe watcher for BYD says that what matters is the car in its complete and articulated profile, not the electric motor-endothermic diatribe
6' min read
6' min read
"BYD employs 1.8 million people. In China it has one hundred and twenty thousand engineers. These engineers are at least as well trained as those who have studied in European polytechnics and American universities. The second largest car manufacturer in terms of number of engineers is the Japanese Toyota, which has 51 thousand'.
In the automotive world, Alfredo Altavilla has built a reputation as a rough and direct man. More than rough and direct, he is elementary and uncomplimentary. And nothing is more elementary and less complacent than numbers. He learnt at the school, not alien to verbal harshness and overwork as a religion and as a definition of himself and others, of Sergio Marchionne, who with an overflowing energy equal to his strategic creativity took two failed and acephalous companies - Fiat and Chrysler - and made one (then) alive and solid, Fca. Today, Altavilla is in charge of strategic oversight of Europe for BYD. He is, therefore, in the position that is both lateral and central, as the link man between the Asian car and the western car.
We are at the Gatto Nero, in Corso Turati in Turin, one of the classic restaurants of the twentieth-century ruling class, both Italian and northern: writers and industrialists, politicians and philosophers have discussed books and closed deals, built power plots and spoken of love gossip in front of top-notch dishes, traditional regional Italian cuisine with some surprising exotic pairings that reflect the madness of an only apparently orderly and canonised city like Turin. With Marchionne, whose most constant collaborator at Fiat since the negotiations with Barack Obama's administration to take over Chrysler in the US in 2009, he has come here for dinner many times. 'We sat at the same table we used to have with Sergio. When we wanted pizza we went to Corso Palermo to Cristina's,' he says.
Alfredo's family is from Taranto. His mother, Francesca, was a housewife. His father, Martino, owned a dealership in the city centre that sold Autobianchi, Citroën and Lancia cars. He - as a real car guy, car-guy you would have said once upon a time, when the sector (and the world) was in the hands of car-crazy men - graduated in economics from the Cattolica University in Milan with a thesis on the strategic management of the Uno's life cycle. Yes, the very car that - in the eighties, the burning season as quick as a flash for the Italian capitalism of Vittorio Ghidella and Raul Gardini, Mario Schimberni and Carlo De Benedetti - allowed Fiat in Turin to wait for the sales figures every month, in a thrilling head-to-head for the European supremacy with Volkswagen of Wolfsburg, which at the time had the Golf as its main model: 'As a student at the Catholic University, meeting Ghidella was decisive for me. Many years later his office in Mirafiori became mine'.
The Gatto Nero's wine list is equal to its cuisine, with both Italian and French labels. We choose a Nebbiolo from Bruno Giacosa, the orthodoxy of one of the Langhe's master winemakers revisited and modernised in taste by his daughter, Bruna Giacosa.
