Alfa Romeo, Maserati given one last chance

The troubled Alfa Romeo brand has been given a 10-year probationary period to prove itself worthy of its place in the newly formed Stellantis stable or else be closed down or sold.

Overseeing 14 brands of varying health and strength, Stellantis head Carlos Tavares this week warned Alfa Romeo that it needed to find its way again or face the consequences.

The warning is a far cry from the succession of five-year plans rolled out by the late Fiat Chrysler Automobiles boss Sergio Marchionne, all of which ended up either discarded or heavily modified as Alfa missed target after target.

“We will do what needs to be done to be highly profitable with the right technology,” Tavares told the Financial Times Future of the Car Summit.

“In the past, lots of other car companies were willing to buy Alfa. In the eyes of those buyers, it has a great value. They are right. It has a great value.”

Few details have been revealed about the 10-year plan for Alfa Romeo, but they will definitely involve electrification and driving dynamics, and Tavares has sent the Peugeot brand’s former savior Jean-Philippe Imparato to Turin to drive it through the traditional Byzantine bureaucracy.

“It [Alfa Romeo] will move to the electrification world, but doing that in a dynamic way, with a passionate, successful CEO from Peugeot,” he said.

“Imparato is an Italian citizen and is driving the brand with passion and vision for what needs to be done.”

Both Tavares and Imparato have admitted that Alfa Romeo has lost its way, with just two current production models following the axing of the Giulietta, none of which have ever approached best-in-class status.

“We need to improve the way we talk to potential customers,” Tavares said. “There is a disconnect with products, history and who we’re talking to.

“We need to fix the distribution and understand to whom we’re talking and which brand promise we’re talking to them about.

“It will take some time to get it right,” he warned.

But Alfa Romeo may not have that much time.

A decade is about one and a half full life cycles for most car models, or a short development program and a life cycle, but not at Alfa Romeo.

The Giulietta hatch finished its production run on December 22 last year – more than a decade after it went into production and having never topped 80,000 sales a year.

The last publicly stated sales figure for Alfa’s answer to the Audi A3, BMW 1 Series and Mercedes-Benz A-Class was for 2018, when Alfa sold less than 27,000 Giuliettas.

The mid-size Giulia sedan is already into its sixth year, having launched in 2015, and the BMW 3 Series fighter has never topped 25,000 sales a year in Europe, nor 10,000 a year in the US.

But there is the piping-hot new GTA range-topper coming soon (pictured), even if it’s strictly limited in numbers.

Alfa Romeo’s only other current production model is the slow-selling Stelvio in the booming luxury SUV sector, while the all-new Tonale mid-size SUV has been delayed.

And last month Stellantis announced the rear/all-wheel drive Giorgio platform, which underpins the Giulia and Stelvio but was once planned to sit beneath eight models, will be dropped in favour of four new electrified platforms across the group.

But Alfa Romeo isn’t the only struggling premium brand at Stellantis and it isn’t the only one on the chopping block.

Deeply troubled Maserati appears safe for now as the clear premium nameplate of the group and it’s about to launch the MC20 supercar , the mid-size Grecale SUV and electrified versions of the Ghibli, Quattroporte and Levante and a reborn GranTurismo and GranCabrio.

That leaves Alfa Romeo bundled up with recently invented luxury brand DS and the storied and once-innovative Lancia as the problem children of the Stellantis Group.

The other brands include Fiat, Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, RAM, Citroen, Opel, Abarth, Peugeot and Fiat Professional (commercial vans), and they are presumably secure, although Chrysler scarcely builds anything anymore.

“My clear management stance is that we give a chance to each of our brands, under the leadership of a strong CEO, to define their vision, build a roadmap and make sure they use the valuable assets of Stellantis to make their business case fly,” Tavares explained.

“We’re giving each a chance, giving each a time window of 10 years and giving funding for 10 years to do a core model strategy.

“The CEOs need to be clear in brand promise, customers, targets and brand communications.

“If they succeed, great. Each brand is given the chance to do something different and appeal to customers.”