The last time Alfa Romeo sold a mainstream car in the U.S. was 1995. A lot has changed since then in the luxury market, a reality that Alfa will have to reckon with as it plans to more than quadruple global sales to 400,000 by 2018 and ramp up North American sales from (effectively) nothing to 150,000 units per year. That would put Alfa roughly on par with where Audi is in the U.S. today, which means Alfa needs more cars, more dealers, a couple of SUVs, and buckets of money.
Fiat-Chrysler has committed to spending $ 6 billion by 2018 on its lagging Italian luxury marque, which today offers 2 hatchback models in Europe plus the 2-seat 4C sportster, none of which are prescriptions for sales volume in the U.S. That will begin to change with a mid-size sedan to debut this June 24 at the reopening of the new Alfa Romeo museum in Milan, Italy, and go on sale sometime in 2016.
The as-yet unnamed car, about the size of a BMW 3-series and with similar pricing, debuts Fiat-Chrysler’s new Giorgio platform, a premium rear-drive component set with its own family of gasoline and diesel engines that will be a workhorse for Alfa. “To have credibility in this market, you can’t mix in mass-market components,” said Alfa’s new U.S. president and CEO, Reid Bigland. “Nobody is going to want to buy an Alfa Romeo made out of a mass-market car.”
With a north-south powertrain and a joint Italian-American design team based in Milan, Giorgio is a rear-drive architecture that has the flexibility for all-wheel-drive, a likely option on the sedan and a certainty on a derivative SUV that will appear within a year. That vehicle will take on the Audi Q5, BMW X3, and other luxury ute competitors. Beyond that, Alfa is said to have a future product portfolio that includes 8 vehicles, one of will be a compact SUV along the lines of the Audi Q3 and BMW X1.
At the Detroit auto show, Bigland and Alfa-Maserati global director Harald Wester described a “pragmatic” approach to reestablishing Alfa. That involves targeting new products at the luxury segments where there’s the most volume, taking advantage of unused capacity at existing plants in Italy, and more than doubling the U.S. dealer count from its current 100 stores by mixing sales points with both Fiat and Maserati showrooms and also establishing some stand-alone Alfa Romeo dealerships. The initiative will concentrate, at least initially, on the Sunshine Belt running down both coasts of the U.S., plus Texas.
Bigland and Wester were tight on the details before the June debut of the new car, but Bigland did say that in the U.S., Alfa will likely stick with gasoline and that diesels are a low priority.
How Alfa Hopes to go From Zero to Sales Hero in the U.S. by 2018
