Buchloe has been turning out belters since 1965 – but that run might now be ending
We recently road tested Alpina’s new B3 Touring ‘GT’. You won’t be surprised to learn it’s quite a good motor car, but it also sounds a death knell for the outfit that makes it.
On 31 December 2025, ownership of the brand will transfer from the Bovensiepens to the BMW Group, ending six decades of family-run status.
There is a possibility that things will continue more or less as they are in terms of the product line-up, but it’s a slightly forlorn hope. The fact that Alpina insiders are referring to the B3 GT as ‘the last of the last’, and that the B8 GT revealed yesterday is packed with tributes to founder Burkard Bovensiepen, tells you everything you need to know.
It’s rather an ominous sign for the man or woman who wants only – ha ha – for a 3 Series with Bentley-grade torque, effortless poise and a truly sumptuous cabin, all underwritten not by ‘oh, this rides pretty well for a 190mph car’ but genuine comfort and refinement. Rare, too.
So what will happen, beyond already robust B3 residuals getting tungsten bracing? BMW has courted execs from luxury goods giant LMVH – with, one imagines, a view to launching Alpina into the limelight as a super-premium rival to Mercedes’ Maybach.
That would be a world away from M, which should at least come as a relief to non-nerd BMW salespersons who have struggled to explain to puzzled visitors why the pinstriped car in the corner costs more than an M3 and they won’t be getting any sort of discount.
Alpina never was that comprehensible to the casuals.
So, rebooting the brand as a rival to Maybach and Bentley’s Mulliner arm. It would be a profit-driven enterprise far removed from Burkard Bovensiepen’s tangibly beneficial contributions to turbocharging and performance-diesel tech, not to mention his erudite interjections into the German political sphere.
It would be for the 1% of the 1%. Which makes me wonder what room this approach leaves for 3 Series- and 5 Series-based models – the heartland of Alpina’s output for those who buy the cars to use them.
In a Maybach-fighting scenario, only the vast 7 Series and X7 would be suitable conduits. They would have all the walnut trim an oligarch could wish for, but the detail engineering – which in the past has extended to Alpina recasting BMW engine blocks so that they might take an extra turbo – wouldn’t be necessary.
Power? Sure, plenty. But ALP-marked bespoke rubber and minute tweaks to camber and torque distribution to give the dynamics additional lustre? Seems unlikely.
All of which is to say, if you have ever hankered after a factory-fresh Alpina of the trad school, get it now. In fact, a couple of months ago was the ideal time, if you want all the bells and whistles.
A full Lavalina leather interior runs to about £14k, which is why it’s rare to see it on anything less than a B7. However, with the potential imminent demise of the B3 and B5, people are going full Sultan of Brunei and ticking every box in sight.
There has duly been a run on Lavalina, and since the saddlery in Buchloe can only upholster five interiors each month (an XB7 cabin represents around 120 hours of work), it has now been taken off the menu.
So yes, there is a waiting list for having your rear armrest trimmed in the hide of some of the most pampered livestock on the planet, with its ‘cloth-like’ softness. Such is the quirky world of Alpina.
As for why the Bovensiepens are getting out, Alpinas are all about ‘no compromise’, which is currently incompatible with EV tech.
Andreas Bovensiepen has also said that hiring good software engineers would be ruinously expensive, and they would be crucial if Alpina were to continue differentiating itself from BMW on an engineering level. With the brand equity at an all-time high, now is a sensible time to offload.
It really is the end of an era, and as Autocar’s resident Alpina tragic, I find it so sad. Still, there have been some excellent moments.
A D3 S to Turin and back at 40-something-mpg and an unprintable average speed; a B3 from Munich to London in one hit; the elderly chap near Liège who stopped in his tracks at the sight of the B4 S I’d parked up: “Woah, a genuine Al-pee-naah!”
My old B4 S long-termer was the one I fell hard for. I can remember travelling to Buchloe in 2018 to collect it, my wife joining the trip. We landed late and a techie from the factory was generous enough to shuttle us from the airport.
At a steady 220kph, he asked if we would share the driving home. I said probably not, because Charlotte hadn’t driven in 10 years.
He glanced at her over his shoulder, turned back to the road, nodded and in Arnie-accented English agreed that it would be “like putting a baby in a Eurofighter”. Gold.
Source: Autocar
