In San Cesario sul Panaro, a town of six thousand people near Modena, there is a building that looks more like a museum than a factory. Inside, a small team builds between forty and fifty cars a year. Each one takes months. Every carbon fibre panel is inspected by hand. The founder, an Argentine who arrived in Italy in 1982 at twenty-three with a letter of recommendation from Juan Manuel Fangio, personally oversees what comes out of the place. The cheapest car they make costs around three million dollars. The waiting list stretches years. They are not publicly traded. They have no outside shareholders. They have no marketing department worthy of the name. They have, in any strict economic sense, no reason to exist, except that what they do is the best that can be done.
The company is called Pagani Automobili. And what it represents, beyond the cars themselves, is a living argument about the relationship between scale and excellence.
Three Italies
To understand what Pagani is, it helps to understand what Ferrari and Lamborghini are, because the three brands share a geography, a tradition, and an aesthetic sensibility, but that is where the resemblance ends.
Ferrari is a luxury brand that manufactures sports cars. This sounds obvious but it isn’t. Ferrari has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 2015. Its market capitalisation exceeds sixty billion dollars, which is more than General Motors. It produces around fourteen thousand cars a year. It runs a Formula 1 team that functions both as a racing division and as a global marketing engine. It has licensing agreements for clothing, watches, theme parks. Ferrari is, in financial terms, a luxury company that uses the automobile as a vehicle, in both senses of the word, for selling a brand.
None of this means Ferrari makes bad cars. They make excellent ones. But they make them within the constraints of a public company that answers to shareholders, that must grow every quarter, that must maintain margins, that must balance exclusivity against volume. Every product decision at Ferrari passes through a financial filter before it passes through an engineering one. This is the inevitable logic of a corporation. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s the nature of the thing.
Lamborghini is a different case and in some ways a more extreme one. Lamborghini has belonged to the Volkswagen Group since 1998, through Audi. The Urus, its SUV, accounts for more than half its sales. Lamborghini produces upwards of ten thousand cars a year. Behind the angular bodywork and the deafening engines, it is a division of a German conglomerate. Strategic decisions are made in Wolfsburg, not in Sant’Agata Bolognese. Platforms are shared with other brands in the group. The DNA of Ferruccio Lamborghini, the tractor-building founder who challenged Enzo Ferrari in the sixties, survives as a marketing narrative, not as an operating philosophy.
And then there is Pagani. Which is neither a corporation nor a division of anything. It is a workshop.
Horacio
Horacio Pagani was born in Casilda, in the province of Santa Fe, in 1955. As a boy he built things: models, scale cars, a miniature replica of a Formula 1 car that took him years. He studied industrial engineering but never finished the degree. What he wanted to do could not be learned at an Argentine university in the seventies. It could be learned in Italy, in the corridor running from Modena to Maranello, where the greatest concentration of automotive knowledge on earth is found.
He arrived in Italy with little money and Fangio’s letter. Fangio was a friend of the family and had written him a recommendation for Lamborghini. They hired him. He worked there for several years, first on the production line and later researching composite materials, carbon fibre in particular, which in the eighties was still a marginal technology in the car industry. Pagani became obsessed with carbon. He understood, before almost anyone in the business, that carbon fibre was not merely a lightweight material but a material that could be beautiful, that the weave of the fabric had an aesthetic quality of its own, that an exposed carbon panel could be as handsome as a painted body.
In 1992 he founded his own company. The first car, the Zonda, came out in 1999. It used a Mercedes-AMG V12 engine, because Pagani lacked the scale to develop his own powerplant and had the intelligence not to try. Everything else was his: the chassis, the body, the interior, every detail. The Zonda looked like nothing else on the road. It was extravagant, curvaceous, vaguely organic, as though someone had crossed a fighter jet with a Brancusi sculpture.
It was an immediate success among the people who could afford one, which was few, and among the people who could only look, which was many. Pagani had proved something the industry had assumed was impossible: that you could compete with Ferrari and Lamborghini without economies of scale, without a dealer network, without a Formula 1 team, without a stock listing. You could compete as a workshop. The condition was that everything leaving the workshop had to be perfect.
Scale as the Enemy
There is a standard economic argument that says scale is desirable. More volume means lower unit costs, which means higher margins or more competitive prices, which means more volume, and so on. It is the virtuous circle of industrial capitalism, and it works. It works for Toyota, for Samsung, for Zara. And it works for Ferrari, which doubled its production from seven to fourteen thousand cars over a decade and multiplied its profits without losing luxury status.
What the argument doesn’t mention is what gets lost. And what gets lost, always, invariably, is control over detail. Because detail is a function of time, and time is a function of scale: the more cars you produce, the less time you can devote to each one. You can compensate with technology, with process engineering, with statistical quality control. But there is a threshold where compensation falls short. There is a point where the difference between an excellent car and a perfect one is a human being staring at a part for twenty minutes and deciding it isn’t good enough. And that does not scale.
Pagani makes fewer than fifty cars a year. Ferrari makes fourteen thousand. The difference is not one of degree. It is one of kind. Pagani can afford to reject a carbon panel because the weave didn’t come out symmetrical. Can afford to have a technician spend an entire day aligning the stitching on a seat. Can afford to have Horacio look at every car before it ships and say no if something isn’t right. None of this is possible at industrial scale. Not because Ferrari doesn’t care about quality, which it does, but because the arithmetic won’t allow it. You cannot produce fourteen thousand cars a year and have a single human being personally inspect each one. It is physically impossible.
What Pagani demonstrates is something modern economics would rather not discuss: that absolute excellence and scale are incompatible. You can have one or the other. Not both. Ferrari chose scale and very high quality. Pagani chose minimum scale and quality without a ceiling. Both are legitimate choices. But they are not equivalent, and the difference shows in the finished product in a way that anyone who has seen a Pagani in person will recognise. It isn’t that a Ferrari is worse. It’s that a Pagani is something else. It belongs to another category, a category where the car is not a product but an object, in the sense that a sculpture is an object or a Stradivarius violin is an object: something made by human hands with an attention that industrial production cannot replicate.
Craft as Future
The conventional story of progress says that craft is the past and industry is the future. That the artisan is a romantic but obsolete figure, surpassed by the machine, the process, the efficiency curve. And broadly speaking it’s true: industrialisation produced more, better, and cheaper than any individual craftsman could. There is no point in making shoes by hand when a factory can turn out thousands a day at a fraction of the cost.
But there is a domain where that logic inverts, and it is the domain of the exceptional. In the exceptional, scale is not an advantage but an obstacle. The exceptional requires time, attention, obsession, the willingness to reject the good in pursuit of the perfect. And those things do not scale. Not because we don’t want them to but because they can’t. Obsession is personal. Attention to detail is personal. The decision that something is not good enough is personal. And the personal, by definition, does not multiply.
Pagani is an extreme case, yes. Three-million-dollar cars are not a replicable business model and not a solution to any of the world’s problems. But Pagani as a principle, the idea that the best work is done small, by people who chose not to grow, who picked perfection over scale, that is replicable. And it is, I think, where the future of excellence lies in a world increasingly dominated by size.
You see it in gastronomy, where the finest restaurants on earth seat twenty tables. You see it in watchmaking, where independent ateliers produce pieces the major houses cannot match. You see it in architecture, in design, in auteur fashion. In every one of these fields, absolute excellence belongs to those who refused to grow. Not out of romanticism. Out of arithmetic. Because perfection requires time, and time is the first thing lost when scale increases.
Horacio Pagani could have grown. Could have courted investors, opened up production, tripled his output. He would have made more money. He would have had more visibility. And he would have lost the very thing that makes his cars what they are. He chose not to. He chose the workshop. And the workshop, sixty years after industrialisation promised to make it obsolete, is still producing the finest things in the world.