Pininfarina, the designers of the vast majority of Ferraris ever built, will be the subject of an exhibition in London this summer. The exhibition will take place at the Italian Cultural Institute in Belgrave Square, and is open to the public from 22 June to 15 July 2012 with free admission. Pininfarina is best known, of course, for cars, but the company has designed many other products as well, from coffee makers (pretty well mandatory for an Italian designer) to furniture and even the torch for the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics.

Hundreds of the company’s designs will be on show including, on the day of the inauguration, a Ferrari FF and a Maserati GranTurismo. The exhibition will also feature four sculptures in cedar wood, reproducing four Pininfarina design icons: the Cisitalia of 1947, the Dino of 1967, the Birdcage 75th of 2005 and the Cambiano, the concept car launched by Pininfarina in Geneva this year. The 2uettottanta, Pininfarina’s concept car launched to celebrate the company’s 80th anniversary in 2010, is represented by a limited edition scale model.The event will also see the launch of Pininfarina’s new urban mobility project. Vectus, designed for a large Korean organisation, is based on a system of small, driverless vehicles, navigating around a network of interconnecting tracks. The passengers are carried from one point to another on demand, without intermittent stops. The idea will be familiar to anyone who has used the new Heathrow Pod system at Terminal 5, but Vectus has been developed for an urban environment.