Yet Giugiaro is seized with hilarity, his dark face reddening and his cheeks squinching up around his shining eyes. He could hardly wait to tell us this whooping good secret.

“You are the only ones to now this, “ he confides. “We sent the Orca to Detroit…. The Orca has been seen by the people from General Motors, Ford, and also Chrysler, just a short time ago. Our idea was just to show the Orca for one or two days, just the general concept, you know? But it spend not two days there, but one full week, and we know that they put the car in the winds tunnel and tested it!” He can hardly control himself; he’s jabbering with merriment. “We know this happened because the tunnel people in Detroit, the technicians, made a call to the people responsible for running Pininfarina’s wind tunnel here in Italy, where we do our testing, and they were asking for the frontal-area measurement of the Orca! You need to know this item to do a test in any tunnel in order to come up with meaningful results.” (Our spy network has revealed that it was General Motors that conducted the actual aerodynamic testing on the Orca).

More peals of laughter. Giugiaro’s brilliant but virginal Orca has fallen into uncouth hands and been panted, her charms discussed, pored over, and widely appreciated--and all the proud father can do is chortle away?

First, you should understand about the Orca, what it is and what it means. What it means is the future. Perhaps more than any other car yet designed, the Orca embodies virtually every attraction a foresighted buyer of a four-door sedan could want. It is all things good in sedan Dom, even though most of them haven’t even been thought of by designers, the majority of whom continue to spread the icing of their talent on single-purpose sports cars or designer originals.

But now there is the Orca to clear your thoughts and maybe your conscience and, heck, even your sinuses for all we know. The Orca is the same overall length as an Audi 4000, yet so efficient is its packaging that it visits upon the atmosphere no more than a 0.245 coefficient of drag, while providing an interior as large as a Mercedes-Benz S-class sedan, which is eeeeeeee-enormous. There is simply no way to comprehend the amount of passenger space inside the Orca unless you remember the first time you lay on your back in the grass and looked up at the Milky Way on a moonless night. Wow! You open any of the doors on the Orca and just sort of fall in, like falling into a king-size bed and waking up in the middle of the night knowing there could be six sensational Amazons tucked here and there in the covers and you’d never find them. There is so much room in the Orca that on a long trip you’ll have to reintroduce yourself to your fellow passengers at every rest stop.

The only question is, Why didn’t somebody do this before? Why did it take Giorgetto Giugiaro to mildly rework the packaging of the automobile as we all know it with the result that all at once we can barely recognize it?

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. We easly recognize the Orca as an automobile, and not so very distant as kin to the current models go, but what’s changing with Giugiaro’s influence is that, for the first time, the efficiency factor is being maximized in every respect. Furthermore, Giugiaro has based this advance on a real car, an existing production piece, instead of a one-off, flexible compatible, designer-friendly prototype shell lacking in function.

His foundation is the Lancia Delta, which unfortunately isn’t sold in this country. The Delta is about the same size as a VW Rabbit but a bit crisper and newer-looking, which is logical since Giugiaro previously designed the Rabbit for Volkswagen. Now the Delta is a pretty terrific little front-wheel-drive package to begin with, but when it developed that Lancia wanted some good publicity and a few rally wins out of its little boxlet, Giugiaro was handy not only as the original sculptor but also as something of Italy’s reigning expert on cleverly executed four-wheel-drive systems. (Ital Design had done it all before with the Fiat Panda.) With Lancia ponying up the R&D funding for six running prototypes of Delta four-by-fours, and the corporate engine department delivering a matching number of 1.6-liter, 130-horsepower turbocharged engines, it was only natural that Giugiaro’s fertile mind began to wonder what it could make of his latest toys. And he’d already had this idea for a trick, ultra-aero sedan for a while…

“When I had first started thinking about a new project, it was about the shape and the proportions for good aerodynamics,” Giugiaro says, “but I started by keeping the overall dimentions of the Audi 80, called the 4000 in the U.S. market. Then I checked the mechanical dimensions of the Audi [the 4000 is another of his designs, by the way], and the engine sits further forward than in theLancia, so I preferred the Lancia because the egnine is closer to the center of the wheels and allows a more compact package with less overhang.”

This potential lack of overhang was very important to the aerodynamic suitability of the leading end of his new pet project, but Giugiaro is quick to reemphasize the fact that he employed an existing mechanical package. The Delta’s chassis was cut apart laterally, and an eight-inch insert was added for two reasons: first the stretched wheelbase would give exactly the length, width, and height proportions he was after for maximum help in his battle with the wind; and second, it would create all that endless legroom. In fact, the Orca winds up with a whopping seven inches more length in its passenger compartment from the pedals to the rear backrest than you’ll find in an Audi 4000, despite their equal lengths. The Orca also enjoys far-flung elbowroom and sky-high headroom, in both cases bettering the already admirable marks set by the big Mercedes.

Observes Giugiaro: “The trend now is to research new aerodynamic shapes, to work for effectiveness in the wind tunnel-- but, when you follow this line of development, you must not forget that people must sit inside these cars and they must be comfortable. This means that you must accept the dimensions of the people as a given, even when your specific concern is aerodynamics.

“All the solutions to packaging are existing, concrete solutions, “ Giugiaro points out. “What we also would have liked to do (and will do more of in the future) was to have influenced the configurations of the underbody of the Orca more than we could with the Lancia package underneath, and we have since made some most interesting progress alone these lines. Through Ital Design, I am also encouraging companies to use doors which wrap up into the roofs of the cars instead of joining where they do now. By wrapping up and over, you realize aerodynamic gains while also reducing wind noise. As a result, you need new and better ways of weather sealing and water channeling, but this is good because good technical solutions must come along with the aerodynamic solutions.”

It was just such a marriage of inspiration and hardware that led to another of the Orca’s major advances: windows that are fully flush when closed, for the slickest possible airflow. The windows work on basically the same principles as flush-fitting sunroofs, merely traveling vertically instead of horizontally, popping in at the bottom and sliding down when opening, sliding up and popping out at the bottom when closing. Pins at the uppermost corners keep the tops of the windows permanently seated in the visible tracks. “So,” Giugiaro says proudly, “when the windows are closed, the car is smooth like an egg.”

Everything about it is smooth, from the nose to the small tail spoiler the master chose in order to avoid the tall, boxy tail that would otherwise be aerodynamically necessary. He has consciously worked for airiness in the Oraca’s interior, with large glass areas (including a flush sunroof) for both livability and outward visibility, each contributing to the comfort quotient that comes part and parcel with every new Ital Design project.

Giugiaro has once again gathered all the controls comfortably around the driver, every function no more than a hand span from completion. Seiko tooled up a complete driver I nformation system for the Orca in less than two months. The instrument display eschews dials, instead providing a “continuous luminous line of two connecting curves indicating gear number, rev count, and speed on a vertical scale.”

Hmmm. We have mixed emotions about that one, but the rest of the car, from its faired-in headlights to its capacious trunk, is totally fine as wheeled creations have become. Giugiaro says the Orca could easily be produced, requiring no exotic materials, no special techniques, no unreasonable outlay of capital, nothing more than the courage of a single manufacturer to reach for new ground. Everything about the Orca says it should be in production, and we ask rhetorically why it is that the wealth of idea and designs that have been poured into so many idea cars over the years seem to have tricked down to the showrooms at such an agonizingly slow pace. Giugiaro feels the Orca is better suited to the European market, but we humbly disagree, finding no good reason for America to shortchange itself.

Who knows? Giugiaro’s Orca may be the bright light at the end of the winds tunnel that all America has been looking for.