Castagna Milano is one of those boutique carrozzeria design firms that builds one-off or highly limited production cars for those with a bountiful wallet. “Coachbuilt” is what their creations would qualify as, and if you ever wanted to build something like an A8 Avant… Castagna Milano is the sort of company you’d probably hire.
A few days ago, Castagna posted two images of this Audi A8 design on their Facebook page. The post (translated from Italian) states:
Project Archive 02
… when they asked us for a wagonette a little bigger than our 500
…when they asked us a wagon a little bigger than our 500
All Alluminium + carbon fibres
Reading from that, we’ll make a few assumptions. For starters, this is an old design rendering they likely did for a client who wanted the ultimate luxury allroad. It’s clearly an A8L, yet wears black body cladding like Audi’s off-road Avants. Curiously, it also has a black roof, perhaps conceived to be made of carbon fiber in order to keep weight low, and also make the recreation of a new roof from carbon fiber as that’s likely much more easy to craft than aluminum given the A8 is built on aluminum Audi Space Frame.
Given they mention the word “Archive”, and that this is the last generation A8, this is likely a stalled project that never went anywhere. Had it been built, we’d expect to have seen photos of the car by now. These shots are clearly made from press photography of the A8 at the time.
We’re guessing this never went past the rendering phase. These images were created, likely no construction happened, and later the firm’s social media team decided to cycle them into their online social media push in order to keep fresh content on their feed. That’s a guess, but it seems likely as we’d expect something more than photoshopped press photos from the likes of Castagna as we’ve seen their coach built cars in the past and are certain they are more than a photoshop rendering house.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can reach out to Castagna Milano directly via their Facebook page HERE.
