Every summer, the world’s most consequential yachts anchor off Monaco, Porto Cervo, and St. Tropez, and a handful of small, doorless Italian cars appear on their swim platforms to carry owners ashore. That ritual dates to the late 1950s, when Carrozzeria Ghia began rebodying the Fiat 500 into the open-air beach car the trade now calls the Jolly. It has just resurfaced in a very different form: Garage Italia and yacht design studio Hot Lab have unveiled a nautical-themed version of the Spiaggina, Garage Italia’s ongoing restomod take on the Jolly, built explicitly as what Hot Lab calls a “yacht toy” for superyacht owners. It is a handsome object, thoughtfully executed. It is also not, in any meaningful sense, a collector car. That distinction is more instructive than the announcement itself.

The Original Jolly Earned Its Provenance the Hard Way

The Fiat Jolly was never meant to be fast, and at roughly 17 horsepower from a 479cc two-cylinder engine, it isn’t. It was meant to be seen. Ghia stripped the doors, swapped in wicker seating, and sold the result to resort hotels, private clubs, and the yacht-owning class of the late 1950s and 1960s, who used it as a land tender, running guests from the harbor to the villa or the beach club. Ownership history tied to Elvis Presley, Jackie Kennedy, and Princess Grace of Monaco is well documented in period photography and auction catalogs, and it is the reason the Jolly occupies real cultural territory rather than mere novelty. The car’s underlying platform, engineered by Fiat’s Dante Giacosa, was mass-produced. Ghia’s coachwork was not. That gap between common mechanicals and rare coachbuilt bodywork is exactly where Jolly values live.

What Genuine Ghia Jollys Actually Bring at Auction

According to RM Sotheby’s results, authenticated Ghia-bodied Jollys have traded in a fairly narrow band: $106,400 for a 1959 Fiat 500 Jolly at Amelia Island in 2021, $82,500 for a 1960 example at Amelia Island in 2011, $110,000 for a rarer four-cylinder 1958 Fiat 600 Jolly at Amelia Island in 2013, and $77,000 for a 1960 car from the Andrews Collection. A 1959 car sold in Dubai brought $39,100. Notably, a “1971 Fiat 500 Jolly Conversion,” cataloged as a recreation rather than an original Ghia body, made 43,700 euros at a Monaco sale, a reminder that auction houses themselves draw a hard line between coachbuilt originals and later reproductions. That range, consistent rather than escalating, tells you the Jolly market has stayed rational. Buyers are paying for documented coachbuilder provenance and originality, not chasing a hot commodity. It’s a useful case study in how a genuinely important design object can remain accessible simply because good examples are still findable and the audience for them, while devoted, is not enormous.

Garage Italia Turned the Jolly Into a Standing Product Line

Garage Italia’s relationship with the Spiaggina name predates this week’s news by nearly a decade. The Milan restomod house first revived the car in 2018 with Pininfarina-reinforced underpinnings, badged Spiaggina ’58 and limited to 1,958 units in a nod to the original’s debut year. By 2024, the line had gone fully electric, with a powertrain from Officine Gentile replacing the old two-cylinder entirely. Today, per Garage Italia’s own site, the Spiaggina starts around 90,000 euros plus VAT, with production capped at 20 cars annually. Worth noting for anyone actually considering one: certain Spiaggina configurations are homologated in Europe as L7E heavy quadricycles rather than as standard passenger cars, a classification that carries its own speed limits, registration category, and licensing implications depending on jurisdiction. That is a meaningfully different ownership proposition than a documented 1960s Ghia original, and it’s the kind of detail a buyer needs from the contract, not the brochure.

The Hot Lab Version Is Built for the Dock, Not the Driveway

The new collaboration layers a marine identity onto that existing EV platform. Hot Lab, part of the Viken Group and known for yacht projects such as the 164-foot Eternal Spark, designed a two-tone livery splitting white above and blue below to echo a hull meeting its waterline. A new indoor-outdoor weave called Scia, developed with Mariaflora, reworks the Jolly’s classic stripe into a wavy pattern meant to suggest a boat’s wake. A wood “Heritage Tunnel” between the seats swaps between a magazine rack and a bottle holder, a Nardi Classic wooden wheel echoes the material, and marine-grade floor mats from Italdek mimic teak decking. As Hot Lab put it, the goal was a car “reinterpreted through the codes, materials and details of the nautical world.” The car remains a concept, though the studio says it is production-ready and intends to offer it directly to owners as an accessory for existing or future superyachts, not as a car sold through conventional retail or auction channels.

The Real Story Isn’t the Car — It’s Who It’s Built For

Treat this launch as an isolated novelty and you miss the pattern it belongs to. We’ve tracked a steady stream of cars positioned as extensions of the superyacht world rather than as standalone automobiles: a Formula 1 car displayed aboard a $55 million superyacht in Dubai, Aston Martin’s $1 million Valhalla debuting aboard a superyacht at the Monaco Yacht Show, and a Bugatti Chiron delivered to its owner by superyacht. The Spiaggina fits neatly into that lineage. It confirms that the client base for eight-figure yachts and the client base for six- and seven-figure limited-run cars have substantially merged, and that manufacturers and coachbuilders now design accordingly, for a buyer who wants a matching, curated set of toys, not necessarily a collector building a documented, historically significant garage.

Tribute, Restomod, or Something Else Entirely?

The collector market has spent the last several years sorting out how it feels about cars built to evoke, rather than to be, a historic original. We’ve made the case that a well-documented, honestly presented tribute can be a legitimate collectible in its own right, examined SGT Automobili’s reverse-restomod approach to homage-building, and pushed back when a conversion’s premise seemed to stretch further than its execution could support. The throughline in all of it is disclosure. A car that is honest about being new, however inspired by the past, earns a different kind of respect than one built to blur the line, the same reasoning that makes a properly documented Abarth tribute a legitimate object rather than a liability. Garage Italia never claims the Spiaggina is a Ghia car. It’s marketed as a new-build restomod with a design lineage, sold at new-build restomod money. That transparency is the whole difference between an homage and a misrepresentation.

What This Means for Serious Buyers

If the goal is a documented piece of Riviera history, matching coachbuilder plates, a verifiable ownership chain, the actual object that once idled on a dock in Portofino, the answer is still the original: a Ghia-bodied Jolly, bought through a house that can substantiate its build and provenance, for meaningfully less than the price of the new nautical Spiaggina. If the goal is a beautifully finished, brand-new design object to keep aboard a boat, Garage Italia and Hot Lab have built one honestly and well. Just don’t confuse the two purchases. A genuine Ghia Jolly is a document of a specific moment in postwar Riviera history. The new Spiaggina is a very well-made footnote to it, and there is nothing wrong with buying a footnote, as long as you know that is what you are buying.

Image via Hot Lab