Science & Tech Quote by Gianni Agnelli

Agnelli is talking about machinery, but he is really talking about time - and the embarrassment of being stuck in it. The line has that slightly improvised, boardroom-confessional feel ("'cos as I mentioned before") that signals an operator trying to make candor sound like strategy. He frames capital investment as more than a production upgrade; it is an admission that the company, and by extension Italian industry, has been living on borrowed relevance.

The key move is the double promise: "the possibility of production" and "even the new technology". Production is the baseline, the thing you must be able to do to stay in the game. Technology is the status marker, the thing that keeps you from being priced out, out-designed, or outpaced. By separating them, Agnelli hints at a harsher reality: Fiat wasn't merely under-capacity; it was under-modern. The phrase "back of seven, eight years" is deliberately imprecise, almost conversational, which softens the blow while making it feel undeniably true - the kind of estimate you offer when the exact number would look worse.

Context matters: Agnelli led Fiat through the postwar boom and into the turbulence of the 1970s and 80s, when global competition and automation were rewriting manufacturing. This quote reads like a justification aimed at skeptics - unions wary of job loss, politicians guarding national champions, shareholders impatient for results. It sells modernization as inevitable, not ideological: buy the machines, or accept decline.