As the final Lancia Lybra rolls out of the Mirafiori factory this month after a six-year stint as Lancia’s mainstay in the compact executive segment, we pay tribute to this excellent, yet always underrated wearer of the famous badge.

The Lybra's death brings to an end, at least temporarily, Lancia’s offerings in the compact executive class, a line which stretches back from the Lybra to the Dedra, Prisma, Beta and Flavia/2000. Instead, its place will at least partly be filled by Fiat’s all-new D-segment contender, the Croma. With lessons drawn from Lancia’s top-of-the-range Thesis saloon, the new Fiat represents a logical successor, especially as its interior has, in more than one instance, been noted (in favourable terms) as being similar to that of a Lancia.

The Lybra was originally conceived under the direction of the then-head of Lancia Centro Stile (since late 1991), Enrico Fumia, although external design house I.DE.A. had a hand in the car’s genesis. This was normally the case, as with the Ypsilon, I.DE.A and Fiat styling centres were drafted in for exterior and interior design proposals. But Fiat’s CEO during that period, Paolo Cantarella, made a conscious decision to favour in-house designs over the work of I.DE.A., Pininfarina, Bertone, and Italdesign, because he felt that only in-house designs could establish a clear marque identity. Fumia’s original sketches and models, dating from 1992, showed a clear resemblance to the 1995 Lancia Y, which was penned at around the same time. In particular, the projected nose and tail treatments were extremely similar to the smaller car, (its stylistic orientation was already clearly defined in the initial concept drawing where Enrico Fumia developed the graphic theme around the lozenge shape described by headlamps and grille deriving from the geometry of the Lancia shield), while the overall proposal showed a marked resemblance to the elegant, yet-to-be-released, Peugeot 406. "Looking at the Lancia models of the past, we identified a series of styling cues, ‘guidelines’ you might say, to interpret and not just replicate,” said Fumia at the time.

However, the car’s gestation was not to be completed without a hiccup or two. In mid-1996, the car was sent back to the drawing board. This was the year when Mike Robinson became Director of Design at Centro Stile Lancia – and he is often credited with the Lybra design. Robinson worked up a small variety of alternative noses, with the additional constraint of having to work around the fact that only limited changes could be made to the tooling. He obviously tried to steer the Lybra design towards his vision of what Lancia was to become – which was the Dialogus / Thesis style.

The original Fumia design was described by the words of motoring journalist Richard Bremner (writing in CAR Magazine), “Dealers saw an early version and rebelled in horror when they realised they were supposed to sell the thing.” While obviously a tongue-in-cheek comment, if Fumia’s early sketches are anything to go by the result was not nearly as bad as that, indeed the design has aged remarkably well and it would be interesting to see what would have transpired if the car had been put into production in that form. Interestingly, even the recent Pininfarina Maserati Quattroporte proposals showed a similar rear-end design, and the design proposal for the estate represented a particularly stylish solution. However, events transpired to cause a restyle and as a result of this delay, the Dedra ended up staying in production for rather longer than had originally been anticipated – indeed, it was just short of its tenth birthday before it was killed off.

In any event, the new Lancia finally made its long-awaited debut at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 1999. The car was available from launch in both four-door saloon and five-door estate variants, the latter known as the ‘SW’, or Station Wagon.