Totem Automobili: the young man building €700,000 cars in Italy, and 5 lessons for business owners

2018: a twenty-year-old designer, an empty warehouse and €150 of foam

In 2018 a designer in his early twenties works at Alfa Romeo. In the evenings he works as a barman. He has no workshop: he has an abandoned warehouse, a €150 block of foam and a €4,000 Alfa, which he himself calls “a corpse”. For years the bank won't give him more than €3,000 of credit. Today his cars cost around €700,000 and more than half his customers are American. His name is Riccardo Quaggio, his company Totem Automobili.

I would have liked to call this episode “the Italian Apple”. Not because Totem makes computers, but because it shows that in Italy you can still build cars without being part of Europe's largest industrial group, Stellantis, by choosing the path of the independent manufacturer. The scale is different, of course. But it is a story of courage that deserves telling, and Riccardo has all my respect.

This episode comes from a superb interview Riccardo gave to Automoto.it, which I recommend watching in full. The line that sums it up for me is this: “For me it wasn't so much the vision as being able to make something. So, despite the tears, the difficulties, the money I didn't have, I managed to build Totem Automobili.”

It is the path of every entrepreneur who has built their own company, or taken it over from their parents and carried it into their generation. Running a business is not all plain sailing as it is in TV series: there are tears, difficulties, money that isn't there when you need it, above all at the end of the month, when salaries and contributions have to be paid. Then you carry on.

Creating manufacturing in Italy, starting from zero

What impressed me is that we are talking about a manufacturing company. Creating manufacturing in Italy, starting again from zero, takes an enormous effort. You have to invest before you sell, find capable people and face problems you hadn't even foreseen at the start, because the product has to be designed, built and delivered. You need space, equipment, reliable suppliers. You have to hire the first people, coordinate their work and have the money to support all of this, because manufacturing burns cash while the project takes shape.

On top of that there is the difficulty of the sector. We furniture makers can ship all over the world without any particular certification, apart from something for the United States. With brass taps for America it is already more complicated. With cars the bar is much higher, because testing and type approval come on top.

The beginning: a few thousand euros and his own work

Riccardo starts in 2018. He works as a designer at Alfa Romeo as an employee, but he wants to make a project of his own. He starts with very few resources and, to fund himself, works as a barman in the evenings. The project starts with a few thousand euros: €150 for the block of foam with which he begins to shape the bodywork and €4,000 for the Alfa to start from. The Alfa GTs are the project's donor cars, and part of the money comes from reselling the components that aren't needed, reinvested straight into the project. The starting capital, in practice, is his head, his work and the revenue from that work.

GT Electric and GT Super

The idea is to bring the beauty of Italian sports cars to an electric car: the GT Electric. Riccardo starts from the shapes and proportions he loves and works to keep their character even with a different powertrain. This is my opinion, he doesn't say it in the interview: starting with electric is probably simpler than starting with an internal combustion engine, which has to be bought or custom-developed by another company. More than a philosophical choice, I think it was the most accessible route, for the same cost, to bring the first cars to market.

The electric car is then joined by the petrol GT Super, with an extraordinary twin-turbo V6 developed together with another Italian centre of excellence, Italtecnica, and a six-speed manual gearbox. This is what opens up the United States market. Totem thus offers two versions, with two different driving experiences.

Two years for an alternator

Every project starts with the idea of linear growth. Then, in the world of business, projects turn out to be far more complex than expected. Every change requires others, the packaging changes, some components don't work and have to be redesigned, and the work grows along with what Riccardo wants from his car. Even an alternator can take years: Riccardo describes two years of problems before reaching the solution. The customer sees the finished car. The trials and errors behind it are known only to the entrepreneur and his team.

People: you learn the trade by working with those who know it

Today Totem involves around 25 people, the figure given in the interview. It is a small, growing company, and Riccardo has to be not only the manufacturer but also the leader: training his staff and giving them and the company a future. I agree 100% with what he says: you learn the trade by working with those who know it. From my point of view an entrepreneur can only delegate what he knows. Otherwise he becomes hostage to the people he delegates work to that he then can't judge.

I have lived through both situations: I founded a business from scratch and I ran a third-generation company, which was not handed to me but which I bought with millions in financing. Whoever founds a company has a competitive advantage: knowledge of the subject and therefore the ability to delegate and train people in their own image. Whoever arrives in the second or third generation has to be manager and entrepreneur at once. If we want to keep manufacturing in Italy we have to allow young people to acquire these skills. There is no school for entrepreneurs in Italy: the school is the field, and we all make mistakes. But at the start, an apprenticeship is how you learn the trade.

A category of its own

Commercially, the link to Alfa Romeo helped attract attention. Not least because, let's be honest, the Alfa brand is not at its most brilliant today: Giulia and Stelvio are leaving the stage and the rest of the range doesn't make anyone dream, least of all the American consumer.

Totem has managed to create a category for itself in the market. What Singer is for the Porsche 911, the restomod par excellence in California and around the world, Totem is becoming for Alfa Romeo: a GT with an Alfa soul, a V6 and a manual gearbox. Owning a category in customers' minds is what makes it possible to sell these cars at around €700,000.

Price and value: emotion attracts, reason wins

What leads a customer to spend a sum like that? You have to understand what they are looking for in that car, what alternatives they are considering and which details matter to them. The uniqueness and appeal of Made in Italy in a well-designed berlinetta built in Italy are its competitive advantage.

More generally, the value of the product has to be recognisable. You attract the customer with emotion and win them over with reason: the two must go together, but emotion comes first. How the product is built, what craftsmanship it requires, how far it can be customised: these are the rational elements we tell the market to justify a high price, whether it is a car or any other product. In Totem's case customisation goes as far as the steering-wheel grip, with 3D-printed prototypes to test its shape and size.

The American market

What struck me most is that around 60% of the customers are American. Totem builds in the Veneto, but finds its main outlet on the other side of the Atlantic. This is the added value of genuine Made in Italy: writing it is easy, producing it in the shapes, materials and craftsmanship is what the market recognises and pays for.

Just this morning I spoke with an entrepreneur who is one of our clients, in the furniture sector, whose turnover is split down the middle: 50% in Italy and 50% in the United States. In my view the successful entrepreneur is the one who manages to export to the United States: 350 million people and the richest market in the world, with no shortage of income or wealth. Getting there takes dedicated marketing and actions. For Totem it means being in front of the right people at Pebble Beach, in California, an event of the highest level where demand meets supply: the collectors who appreciate this kind of car.

A high price is necessary to do business in Italy

Naturally €700,000 of revenue is not €700,000 of profit. But a high price is necessary to do business in Italy, because first we have to absorb the cost of running a company, the highest in Europe and among the highest in the world. Think of energy: France costs much less than we do and Spain less than half. That is also why Stellantis builds in Spain and not in Italy: the finished product costs less. If you sell a B-segment car you have to optimise every cost. Can I afford Made in Italy? In my view only if I sell at the high end, which thanks to product, quality and image allows me to absorb these costs.

Before profit come materials, employees, suppliers, development, overheads, marketing, type approval. Here you have to separate fixed costs from variable ones and calculate the first-level margin, the contribution margin, which for me is the most important number to keep under control when you sell a product or a service.

Credit: €3,000

I consider Riccardo a modern hero of Italy's entrepreneurial class: he created a manufacturing company from scratch in the hardest sector, automotive, producing the finished product. And he did it in a country where access to credit is not what it is in the United States. In Italy, if you are just starting out, but even if you are an established entrepreneur, nobody helps you without personal guarantees. A track record of positive accounts is another matter, but at the start you don't have one.

The crazy thing is that for a long time, until recently, the maximum credit the banks granted Quaggio was €3,000. A company that sells €700,000 cars was born with access to credit of zero. Riccardo says something I agree with: “Italy is the last European country that can still afford to make this kind of product.” We have the Renaissance in our DNA, beauty done well, the quality of a piece that doesn't leave production unless it is perfect, whether it is steel, a tap, a piece of furniture or a car. For us entrepreneurs, Made in Italy is one of the few things that can save us.

The brand and the tradition

Totem is not only building cars: it is building a brand, and that is the company's real value. It is reviving an Italian tradition that had almost disappeared, that of the independent car maker. Innovating doesn't always mean erasing the past: sometimes it means taking what we were best at and making it attractive and desirable again.

The future: Tiziano and the Serie T12

Nobody knows what the future holds, but in my view it is very promising. In August 2026, at Pebble Beach, Totem presented Tiziano, its proprietary technical platform. This is the real turning point: from restomod to independent manufacturer. No more donor cars, but a blank sheet: a carbon-fibre monocoque, aluminium frames designed in-house and three powertrains, electric, twin-turbo V6 and naturally aspirated V12. An independent Italian manufacturer building a naturally aspirated V12 in Italy again. The engineering is separate from the form, so very different cars can be born from the same base.

The first expression of Tiziano is the Serie T12, with the naturally aspirated V12 developed with Italtecnica and the six-speed manual gearbox, which will be presented in 2027. The chassis was deliberately shown without bodywork, with a promise: the customer joins the creative process. That is true bespoke.

The 5 lessons for business owners

1. Start before you're ready

You don't need everything: you need enough to take the first step. Totem started from a €4,000 car, an empty warehouse and €150 of foam. The stuff an entrepreneur is made of makes the difference, but don't wait until you have everything ready, because “100% ready” doesn't exist. At some point you have to set off and correct course as you sail.

2. Don't improve a commodity: get out of the commodity

If you do what everyone else does, the customer will compare features and price. If you build a category of your own, as Totem is doing, you change the ground you compete on. Building a category in the customer's mind is one of the hardest things to do, but it is worth it: the results follow.

3. Desire first, then the specifications

This applies to everyone, whether you sell a product or a service. The technical side is fundamental, because it justifies the high price of a Made in Italy product, but desire has to come first: the world you build around the product, the storytelling, the videos, the photos, everything that speaks to the customer's emotional side. Then come the technical data, materials and performance, to give the emotion rational support.

4. Look for the customers willing to pay the price you ask

Your market is not necessarily the one on your doorstep. Totem builds in the Veneto and around 60% of its customers are American. Don't just ask yourself whether you need to lower your price to sell, which is the worst thing you can do. Ask yourself where, beyond your catchment area and your current database, there are other customers who can buy your product.

I started travelling the world with a briefcase more than twenty years ago, when there was no internet: you visited customers on the other side of the world without knowing them and built everything from scratch. Today, with social media, YouTube, website, blog, SEO and video calls, the distance between company and customer, even in business to business, has shrunk enormously. Provided you know how to use these tools properly.

5. The high end is not a price, it's an economic model

This may be the most important lesson. Premium and luxury start from positioning and from the value the customer perceives. Thanks to these two elements you sell at a higher price than those in the mid-market, you generate cash, you reinvest the cash and you build the brand. Everything has to work together for high-end positioning to become a machine that produces margins, to reinvest in your own company.

By producing better, not more

I wanted to tell Totem's story because it shows that in Italy you can still create manufacturing, build skills, generate work and turn design and craftsmanship into value recognised around the world. Italy is unlikely to win by producing more for less, as it once did. But it can still win by producing better and at higher value. To Riccardo Quaggio and Totem Automobili, my very best wishes.

Automoto.it's original interview with Riccardo Quaggio is on YouTube. Photos and renders: Totem Automobili, official press kit and newsroom. The scenes marked as reconstructions are generated with artificial intelligence.