[EDIT - THIS IS NOT MY ARTICLE - I DIDN'T WRITE IT BUT THOUGHT I'D JUST POST IT AS ITS ALFA RELATED AND THIS IS A ALFA FORUM. I LOVE MY ALFA! Well, apart from the niggles...]
In our brand-obsessed world you would think that a car badge with the proud history of Alfa Romeo would be pretty much a guaranteed winner.
We're talking about an automotive moniker with more history than BMW and Audi combined, a company that was winning Grands Prix in the 1930s and which went on to create some of the most exciting sportscars of the post-war period.
When it comes to design, Alfa has rarely put a corporate foot wrong. Even when the product quality achieved its absolute nadir in the 'seventies and 'eighties, it was still building some of the most stylish grotboxes out there. The current model line-up is packed with handsome, different, interesting-looking cars.
Which is why I'm left scratching my head about why the company is in such dire straits in the UK right now, with sales having fallen dramatically during the last five years. Granted, the moribund 147 hatchback can't be expected to do anything for volumes - I bet most people think it died years ago. But the current 159 saloon and estate are both handsome, well-constructed cars, the GT coupe is okay-ish if that's your kind of thing and the Brera/ Spider is one of the best looking sportscars out there.
So what's the big problem? It won't surprise you to learn that I've got some of my own ideas on that one - but let's start with a brief historical detour.
Back when I was a kid in the 1960s, Alfa was treated with the sort of reverence that now gets lavished on the likes of Ferrari. The company's products seemed almost impossibly exotic. I can remember poring over magazine road-tests and reading about details like four wheel disc brakes, five speed gearboxes and - most amazingly of all - a 1.3 litre twin-cam engine that was capable of producing 100 bhp. (At the time the agricultural British 'A' series motor managed to squeeze 67 bhp from 1275cc of swept capacity.) Alfas were stylish, beautifully engineered and expensive - they didn't sell in big numbers in the UK, but the people who bought them were nearly all mad-keen enthusiasts.
Then the 1970s happened and the rot set in. Literally, as it turned out. Alfa diversified into producing some more mainstream models, most prominent of which was the Alfasud hatchback: a nice looking thing that used an advanced front-wheel drive chassis to impressively sharp driving dynamics. It should have been a winner, yet, in the UK it pretty much sank the company's reputation once and for all.
The smart new factory at Pomigliano d'Arco that was turning out the Sud had industrial relations bad enough to make Longbridge or Cowley in the UK look like the last twenty minutes of It's A Wonderful Life. For the Trotskyite lineworkers, screwing Suds together took a back seat to fermenting plans for international revolution (over a three-course pasta lunch, naturally). Indeed, the plant's famously terrible build quality suggested the car itself might have been a pre-emptive strike on the fabric of the capitalist system.
But the workers couldn't be blamed for the 'Sud's biggest failing: the fact it was constructed from low-grade steel bought cheaply from (appropriately enough) the Soviet Union. It only took a few months of the British winter to reveal the 'Sud suffered from a terrifying propensity for corrosion. Within as little as three or four years a badly blighted 'Sud would be fit for nothing more than the scrapheap, and the main reason you see hardly any of them around (against the number of similar vintage mk1 VW Golfs that have survived) is that most of them have long since dissolved.
Relevance of all this to Alfa's current predicament? The simple fact that, in the minds of the British car-buying public, Alfa has never been able to get away from the reputation earned for it by its shonky 'seventies and 'eighties products, of which the 'Sud's tendency to extreme rot was the worst example.
It's strange when you consider how quickly Skoda has been able to turn around its reputation - from joke brand to major player in under ten years. But go into any pub in the country, find the resident 'car expert' (he'll be the guy propped against the bar with the reddest nose) and you'll get all the same Alfa cliches pouring out: "yeah, great to look at but they just fall to pieces, don't they? The Italians like their cars like they like their women - expensive and high-maintenance." He'll then go onto tell you about how his mate's mate suffered at the hands of an Alfa dealer who spat in his face before suggesting, meaningfully, that his glass is empty and you might like to top it up a bit, squire.
Granted, elements of Alfa's UK dealer network certainly don't help the cause any, and it would be fair to say that Alfa doesn't sit very high in the list of automotive franchises that dealers aspire to get hold of. But many of them are actually pretty decent, certainly compared to the utter disdain meted out to some punters who even dare to enter a premium German chrome-and-glass 'experience centre' - and there are few parts of the country without a really good Alfa specialist.
Alfa's biggest problem, I reckon, is the over-optimistic pricing that's been stuck to the corporate line-up for years. Put simply, Alfa isn't a premium brand. You're not going to persuade the sort of guy who was about to sign up for a BMW 318i that he actually wants an Alfa 159 instead, even if it does come with a more powerful engine and a few extra toys.
But what about the punter who is also looking at a VW Passat or Ford Mondeo? He'd love a bit of Italian glamour - and if the leasing fees are kept low enough and the dealer network is tweaked a bit then his fleet manager isn't going to mind sticking him into a 159 instead. Similarly the Alfa Brera makes absolutely no sense for as long as it costs £2000 more than the equivalent Audi TT. But for £2000 less than its German rival, I reckon that there would be something close to queues forming outside dealerships.
From a product point of view, Alfa hasn't been stronger since those heady days of the 1960s - and behind that simple truth lies the potential renaissance of one of the strongest brands there is.
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