Who Actually Owns Supercar Maker ATS?

BOLD RIDE

Copyright © 2015 Bold Ride LLC.

 

Posted by Jeff Perez

 

The other day, we were introduced to the ATS 2500 supercar. It’s lovely. It’s fast. It’s Italian. Except there’s a big problem with it— the car, the design, the trademarks, everything was allegedly stolen from one designer. How does one go about allegedly stealing an entire vehicle idea? It goes like this…

 

We were contacted by a man named Gianluca Gregis. He claims that the ATS 2500 GT is his baby and has been since 2012. Except when it debuted this weekend at Top Marques in Monaco, he had no idea. His design, his trademark, his website, even, all allegedly stolen by one Daniele Maritan. Here’s what Gianluca told us in the email

“I read the article about ATS at Top Marques and I want to inform you that all the information given to you is totally false. ATS 2500 GT is my project, and ATS is my brand covered by European copyright.”

You can see the copyright here, which is still very much legally binding.

After the first email, I reached out to Gianluca to find out a bit more about exactly how his project was even stolen at all:
“Unfortunately this situation has been a nightmare for me since last October. I am the ATS owner and I founded it in 2011 and started to build cars and projects. ATS’ official website has been online since 2012 and owned by me.”

That website is ats-autosport.com, which Gianluca claims was taken over by Maritan in 2014, and used to display the production version of the ATS 2500. None of this was approved by Gianluca, the legal owner of ATS. But it gets messier.

“Maritan convinced me to move all my stuff and cars from my workshop to his in mid 2013. He promised me payment for a quote of my projects and for ATS, but this never happened. One day, when I insisted he clarify on the situation, he locked me outside the workshop saying that everything now is his own property.”

Learning of this new information, I reached out to Degler Studio. (Note: Degler Studio is in no way involved in the actual production of the ATS 2500 GT, but only took the photos of the car and sent us the original release created by ATS). Degler gave me an email to contact within ATS, and followed up with a brief summary of what they knew regarding the situation:

“What I know of that person is that he tries to confuse people with different news, because he was before part of it. As far as I know the company and Gregis are solving their problems with their advocates and I do not have any more information about that.”
Doing a little bit of research, I quickly learned that this is not the first issue with ATS. In February 2015, both Gianluca (ATS Spain), and Maritan (ATS Italy) claim the right to the ATS name in Europe in a report by Carscoops. The statement from ATS Italy reads:

“We are the real ATS Automobili, we are located since 2011 in Borgomanero (NO) Italy. We had and we have a lot of problems with Gregis, he was a collaborator but is from September that he isn’t our collaborator. He is using our registered designs, our website (he has changed all our passwords), our old email and he made a false signed to stole our company brand ATS (I attached a copy of the lawsuit made by the real owner of the ATS Brand at Oami in Alicante). I attached you also our registrations of design.”
The trademarks filed by ATS Italy can be seen here.

With that, ATS Italy built and produced the 2500 GT you’ll see this weekend in Monaco, a design allegedly penned by Gianluca himself. I’ve since reached out to ATS, but haven’t heard anything back.

 So far, both seem to have some sort of legal grounding in the issue. And legal or not, the ATS 2500 GT supercar is on display at the Top Marques Monaco this weekend.
We’ll update this news as we get more information.

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