>Look, Alfa Romeo is just another global bland...er brand these days.
Okay, you guys - what isn't? Oldsmobile was the oldest extant marque in
the US when GM killed it off, but does anyone have any recollection of
these cars somehow embodying and perpetuating Ransom E. Olds's vision or
whatever? It was a kind of sedan that at one time or another filled one
niche or another, as GM directed. In the 1930s through the early '50s it
was their "experimental" marque - the first automatic ('39?), followed
by the BW 4-speed, and (if you're old enough to remember) this was GM's
performance brand while Pontiac was still running their dull and not
terribly reliable flathead straight-eights and sixes. What I'm getting
at is that any multi-marque manufacturer is going to position its
several marques either to sell as many units as possible or to sell
enough to the right sort of people as to slosh some glamor over onto the
rest of the lineup, and will occasionally change the juggling order as
the market changes.
Fiat has a rather odd setup in that it owns four "prestige" brands
(prestigious to one extent or another), though that perception is
probably limited to those of us who grew up reading car magazines. We
have to remember that Alfa is regarded by Italians pretty much like
Oldsmobile was to us: worthy, useful cars, a cut above the deeply
mundane but hardly the stuff of dreams. The cops drive them, for Pete's
sake! The Lancias that we most fell in love with, similarly, were not
the ones that kept the factory in business; for every Aurelia B20 sold
here there were umpteen hundred Aurelia and Appia four-doors sold to
people in the home market.
I think, given the complex challenges of selling cars in so many
markets, coupled with the necessity to make enough money to pay the help
and keep the doors open, that Alfa didn't do that bad a job precedent to
the Fiat takeover, and that Fiat hasn't done that bad a job since.
Someone here was hating on Hruska, which I think is a mistake; the
decision to build a factory in a region where there was damned little
tradition of mechanical craftsmanship - it's part of Milanese culture,
but hardly of sourthern Italian - was a dreadful one, and we can blame
that squarely on the government, but the Sud design had a lot to
recommend it. If I could find an unrusted one in my price range I'd buy
it in a heartbeat, and the same with the Alfetta, whether GT or Berlina.
As for the 164, the European motoring press was damn near unanimous in
saying that of all the versions of this design, Alfa's iteration was
easily the class of the crowd. I'm less enthusiastic, finding ours to be
not as roomy inside (except for width, which I don't value very highly)
or as nice to drive as the Milano, but it does go like the hammers of
hell and changes direction very nicely.
Remains to be seen, I suppose, whether Alfa's sales slump was just part
of a general one, a dropoff against some better-selling siblings and
other competitors, or a more worrying erosion of the buying public's
interest, following the rather puzzling pattern of Saab - remember when
any young lawyer who didn't buy a BMW had a Saab? And now they're a drug
on the market. I would fall to my knees and pray for a similar fate for
BMW, but that would be wrong of me...
Will Owen
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