By the time the Cadillac Allanté began being delivered to customers, each example had made quite the journey. In the late 1980s through early 1990s, Allanté bodies were shipped from the Pininfarina San Giorgio factory in Italy to the Detroit-Hamtramck plant, where they were completed with domestically-manufactured chassis and engines. Despite being responsible for manufacturing operations of some Cadillac, Alfa Romeo and Ferrari models, the Pininfarina factory has since fallen into disrepair, and urban explorers recently entered the decaying facility to check out what it looks like now.
As a reminder, Cadillac joined forces with Pininfarina in 1983 for the Allante. Shortly thereafter, the San Giorgio factory was built to handle the project in 1985. The Italian coachbuilder designed and built Allanté bodies locally, handling painting , adding trim and convertible tops. The unfinished bodies were then shipped from Turin International Airport in Italy via modified Boeing 747s – aka the “Air Bridge,” which could carry up 56 car bodies per flight to be finished in Detroit. This process was referred to as “the world’s longest assembly line,” and was, understandably, a very costly operation.
Just 21,430 units of the Cadillac Allanté were sold, as cost of production proved to outweigh the profits. Assembly for the two-door drop-top wrapped up after the 1994 model year, and the San Giorgio facility shifted focus. Post-Cadillac projects included Ferrari models, Peugeot, and, most recently, Alfa Romeo.
However, the 2008 recession proved to be too much for the niche facility to overcome, as producing exclusive, high-dollar vehicles in very limited quantities was no longer a sustainable business model. The San Giorgio factory was shuttered in November 2010, and the facility has remained largely untouched since, save for the odd copper thief or urban explorer.
Check out the video below to see what remains of the once-great factory responsible for production of the Cadillac Allanté.
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