By 2025, practically every volume car manufacturer and many smaller workshops are expected to develop and produce electric car models, with the help of a complete supply chain of raw materials, battery manufacturing and drivetrain development.

This does not just include the producers of family cars and small city runarounds, but off-roaders, pick-up trucks and even supercars. One of the first cars to prove that EVs could potentially be practical was the Tesla Roadster, a heavily modified sports car based on the Lotus Elise.

Around 35 years before this, however, a company better known for making performance cars attempted to change the future of motoring with an electric vehicle nobody saw coming.

The Elegance Of Zagato

Many early electric cars were made by dedicated but very small companies or divisions. The Scottish Aviation Scamp, the Enfield 8000 and the Sinclair C5 were all examples of companies that had relatively little experience in the vehicle market.

This was not true of Zagato, a historic Italian coachbuilder that became one of the most famous and successful of the great styling houses of the era alongside Italdesign and Pininfarina. 

They were, up to that point, most famous for designing sleek sport versions of cars such as the Lancia Fulvia, the Aston Martin Zagato and the first-generation Ford Mustang.

That appeared to be the plan for the 1970s, until a sudden spike in oil prices curtailed a lot of interest in luxury sports cars, and this caused the company to go radical in a way that nobody expected.

The Opposite Of Expectations

The Zagato Zele is perhaps the most surprising car that a company known for luxurious sports car designs could ever make, and whilst it is easy to characterise it as a kneejerk response to an oil crisis, this is not the full story.

It was originally unveiled at the 1972 Geneva Salon and was the brainchild of Elio Zagato, founder Ugo’s son and a man who grew up in a very different world from his father.

The era of the specialist coachbuilder was dying and Zagato was reeling from the decision by many of their major manufacturing clients to bring their car designs in-house.

As well as this, Mr Zagato realised that the priorities of the motorist had changed, with practicality, fuel economy and technological advancement being more important than the spirit of speed.

Zagato would design some of its most iconic and traditionally beautiful cars in the 1970s, but the Zele was designed to be light, small and practical. It had enough room for two in the front and a few shopping bags in the back, but nothing else.

This in itself made it look radical and shocking, almost provocative even. It was as much a statement as the sports cars had been, and was designed to be cheap to build and therefore cheap to buy, the opposite of everything they had stood for up to that point.

Journalists and commentators at the time did not entirely know what to make of the tiny car with a theoretical top speed of 30mph, a range of around 50 miles, a body made in two parts from fibreglass that was barely over six feet long and a chassis made from cut-up parts of the Fiat 124 and Fiat 500. 

At the time, it was treated as a quirky concept car, something that was not designed to sell. Shockingly, it sold so well that it saved the company.

Success Beyond Numbers

The Zagato Zele sold for just two years between 1974 and 1976, with distribution in the UK handled by Bristol and in the US by Elcar, but few cars have perhaps had timing as perfect as the Zele.

It sold around 500 units before being discontinued, far fewer than the 3000 originally planned, but that still turned out to be enough to keep the company afloat. It helped that a later revision of the design provided greater practicality, and Zagato would sell a total of 3000 electric cars before returning its focus to exotic sports cars.

It was a stable enough endeavour for the company to make a comeback with striking models such as the Aston Martin V8 Zagato, but the unfortunate consequence of this return to form is that the influence of the Zele has been somewhat forgotten.

The microcar would become extremely popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which coincided with the resurgence of the electric car as a genuine alternative for petrol-powered motoring.

As with other experimental microcars during the Oil Crisis era, it has become more fondly remembered in retrospect.