THE Lancia Y , launched in 1996, was not only distinguished in its design — still hardly consensual today, but one of the best exercises in formal cohesion and originality — but it also seems to have been one of the precursors of automotive personalization, a common possibility nowadays, independently of the market segment.
The masterful lines drawn by Enrico Fumia began by being able to be filled with 12 colors. It didn't take long, however, for an impressive 100 colors to be added to the Lancia Y catalog through the Kaleidos program.
There were colors to suit all tastes. The 100 new shades could be metallic or pastel and were distributed over 25 shades of blue, 25 greens, 19 reds, 16 purples and 15 between browns and greys. We could hardly find a shade to our liking and in contrast to the typical neutral colors that are most common in the cars we buy.
The Kaleidos program was initially offered only in Italy, where the customer would choose the color of their future Lancia Y from a display at the dealership (above), with this option being expanded to other markets.
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The “boom” of car customization, however, would only take off definitively with the arrival of the MINI (BMW's first) in 2000.
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