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What happens when an Italian coach-built body meets an all-American V8 drivetrain? If your answer was something to the tune of “one of the greatest combinations in the history of the automobile,” you wouldn’t be too far off. But one long-forgotten duo arguably did it better than anyone else. If you park one right next to a Ferrari from the same period, there’s a good chance you’ll gravitate towards it first, not the familiar prancing horse. It combined an iconic American brand at the height of refinement with the best in Italian design, and now it’s almost completely forgotten.
Virgil Exner: Automotive America’s Design Juggernaut
It would be wrong to peg Virgil Exner — one of America’s premier automotive designers for nearly four decades — as a one-trick pony. Best known by Mopar fans for designing the bewilderingly beautiful Plymouth XNR sports car concept, Exner had already garnered an enviable reputation before arriving at Chrysler in 1949. Before the age of 30, General Motors trusted him to call the shots for Pontiac’s increasingly daring design team.
Later, Exner moved to South Bend, Indiana, to work at Studebaker. There, Exner designed the cutting-edge Starlight coupe. It was so sleek and low-slung for the time, that folks used to wonder whether it was coming or going. Exner’s flair for design was at least in part inspired by the graceful styling cues then forming in Europe, but also from emerging aeronautical design motifs directly inspired by the jet age.
Exner wasn’t the first to apply themes from aviation to post-war American cars. But when he saw the fins on a 1949 Cadillac, directly inspired by the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, Exner knew he could do it just as well, if not better. By the late ‘50s, Chryslers, Dodges, and DeSotos alike were sporting jet-like fins just as prominent as their GM rivals. This “Forward Look” design language went on to define the Mopar family in the pre muscle car-era, but it was far from the limits of Exner’s ambitions.
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Teaming Up With Ghia: A Marvelous Pairing Created By Fate
Exner was hard at work designing concept cars for Chrysler Corp during the 1950s. In that time, he had the opportunity to work alongside the Italian designers at Carrozzeria Ghia. Based in Turin, Ghia is most commonly associated with the Fiat, Lancia, Ferrari, and Alfa Romeo coach-built bodies that it’s designed for domestic partners. It’s also iconic for designing the Beetle-based Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, and how could it not be? It’s right there in the name.
But Ghia wasn’t beholden to just working with European manufacturers. At various times, they’ve worked with all of Detroit’s Big Three automakers, plus Studebaker and Packard. During the early 1950s, Ghia was hitched to Chrysler, designing a series of concept cars in 1954 and 1955, dubbed the Firearrow I through IV. The cars were designed in tandem by a team led by Virgil Exner and Italian hot shot Luigi Segre.
Shortly before, Segre had helped VW roll out the Karmann Ghia, of which he was a key overseer on the project. But working with Chrysler turned out to be an entirely different animal, one that called for bolder, less reserved styling. In short, the design team could cut loose, and once the concepts were done making the rounds, they were free to do something on their own.
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Dual-Ghia: Italian-American Design at its Absolute Best
Whether Chrysler or Dodge actually wanted to do anything with the Firearrow, or its other amazing concepts of the day, like the Falcon (no relation to Ford), is still debated today. One would certainly assume that was the plan, given they revised the car at great expense with a top name in the industry no less than four times. Some attribute the reason they never did to budget cuts, or the feeling by Chrysler that competing with the Corvette and the Thunderbird just wasn’t a priority.
The design was further refined into the nearly production-spec Firebomb, a remarkably provocative name for the 1950s. But ultimately, nothing became of the project, apart from some very eye-catching design case studies and public appearances. As it turned out, Chrysler’s loss was the gain of none other than a Detroit businessman named Eugene Casaroll. An Italian-American by birth, Casaroll lost his lunch, plus a lot more besides, in the 1929 stock market crash. From there, he worked on automotive assembly lines before devising a design for a purpose-built car-hauling platform.
The Second World War gave no shortage of applications for his design, Casaroll even developed twin-engine tank-hauling trucks for the Allied forces under the name Dual Motors. Now, a decade later, and with Chrysler effectively doing nothing with near mass market-ready concepts, Casaroll’s plan was simple. He’d buy the rights to the designs directly from Chrysler, and make them himself alongside Ghia. With that, Dual-Ghia was officially founded in 1956.
The World’s Largest Assembly Line: From Detroit to Turin
One of the more colorful practices Dual-Ghia borrowed from Chrysler was its assembly process. The Dodge-based rolling chassis, borrowed from the Custom Royal lineup, was assembled at the company’s main facility in the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck. Upon completion, the chassis was packed into a crate, shipped to the nearest port, and put on a ship across the Atlantic. By the time it arrived in the Port of Genoa, the frames often bore surface rust from the constant exposure to salty sea air.
Once the surface rust was cleaned, Turin would attach the body to the chassis and powertrain as incomplete shells. Then, they’d go right back on the ship, back to the US, for final assembly and sale. Under the hood, folks had the choice of two of Chrysler’s most potent engines. The smaller of the two was a 315-cubic-inch “Poly” V8, which used the similar blocks and internals as the early Hemi, but with polyspheric cylinder heads and a four-barrel carburetor.
Dual Ghia D500 Engine Specs
|
Displacement |
Horsepower |
Torque |
|
361 Cubic Inches |
260 HP |
330 LB-FT |
Later on, a 361-cubic-inch “Wedge” series V8 from the Dodge Polara was added. While no muscle car, in its most powerful D500 configuration, this motor made 320 horsepower at the crank. That was no small number back then, even if measuring in gross horsepower was cheating somewhat. Performance was still more than adequate for the period, and it’s not like speed was the name of the game for a docile GT coupe or drop-top like this application. With acres of wood, metal, and the finest Italian leather that Dual-Ghia could find, this was a car for cruising thousands of miles in a few trips.
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A Flash in the Pan, But What a Flash It Was
With a manufacturing process that elaborate, it’s no wonder the cost was carried over into the price. With a base MSRP of $7,650, or nearly $94,000 in today’s money, every hand-formed body panel and stitch of leather added up to big bucks in overhead and labor costs. Granted, 117 managed to get sold, ostensibly at a huge loss, but to people like the actor Sterling Hayden, future US President Richard Nixon, and the iconic Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.
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Eugene Casaroll’s health began failing soon before production ceased. Afterwards, his business partner and confidant, Paul Farago, attempted to revive the brand in the early 1960s with Ghia’s L6.4 GT car. This venture would fail as well, and all the while, Virgil Exner would soon retire, attempting to revive iconic brands like Stutz and Duesenberg as passion projects with varying success.
Today, Dual-Ghias are collector’s items that sell for massive amounts of money at auctions. In 2025, a 1957 Dual-Ghia sporting a 315 V8 sold for $313,000 at Broad Arrow’s Amelia Island event in Florida. Another, more original-conditioned drop-top, sold on Bring a Trailer for $550,000 back in 2022. It proves once and for all that you don’t need an iconic nameplate to make a memorable car. Sometimes, you just need good looks and an even better story.
Credit: Classic.com, Broad Arrow Auctions, Hagerty
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