Through the years, Ghia has produced many bodies for several automobile manufacturers such as Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Ferrari, Fiat, Ford, Jaguar, and Volkswagen.

Ghia initially made lightweight aluminium-bodied cars, achieving fame with the Alfa Romeo 6C 1500, winning Mille Miglia (1929).

Under the ownership of Luigi Segre, between 1953 and 1957, Giovanni Savonuzzi became Direttore Tecnico Progettazione e Produzione Carrozzerie e Stile and established Ghia as the most influential proponent of that Italian styling that came to define automobile design trends worldwide.

During this transition period, Ghia had partial involvement in the De Tomaso Pantera, a high-performance, mid-engined car using a Ford V8.

Aside from this, the most publicly visible sign of Ford's ownership of Ghia has been its use of the name to denote the luxury trim level of its European models for many years (below).

Ghia's owner Luigi Segre had pushed for the creation of this car, but after his sudden and untimely death the G230 S never entered production.

However, in 1965 film and television producer Burt Sugarman saw a picture of the G230 S on the cover of Road & Track magazine and convinced Ghia to build another car using a similar design.

[5] The 450 SS used the same design language as the smaller G230 S, but its hand beaten steel panels sat on a more traditional and sturdier ladder frame.

This lasted until the major facelift of 1994, when the Granada name was dropped and replaced by Scorpio for all variants, at which point the Ghia model resumed its position at the top of the range.

The British Ford Fiesta retained the Ghia trim designation for the longest period of any model: 31 years 8 months, uninterrupted, from February 1977 to November 2008.