Alfa Romeo's place in the plan

Alfa Romeo is banking on a €5 billion investment and more engineering independence from its Fiat Chrysler parent company to turn around its horrendous slide.

Viewed as a collapsing brand, Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne is hoping that eight new Alfa Romeo models will lift its sales from just 74,000 in 2013 to more than 400,000 sales in 2018.

Alfa Romeo currently has just two mainstream production models (the MiTo and the Giulietta), plus the 4C sports car, and its products haven’t been viewed as strong enough to tackle the much-vaunted comeback to in North America.

The once-mighty brand hasn’t made money in a decade, but it is pinning its entire future on a new architecture, dubbed Giorgio, that will be capable of being used in both rear- and all-wheel drive production cars.

With a target of “best-in-class” set by Alfa Romeo CEO, Harald Wester, the architecture is being developed in a secure area inside the Maserati headquarters in Modena by a select team of 200 Fiat Chrysler engineers. Headed by Fiat Chrysler technical boss, Philippe Krief, the team is also being tasked with ensuring that Giorgio can fit beneath Chrysler and Dodge models.

Presenting the brand’s five-year business plan yesterday, Mr Wester insisted it would underpin vehicles from the compact to the large segments and will spread from cars to SUVs as well.

This is the most solid indication yet that Alfa will not replace the unloved MiTo hatch and that the next generation of the front-drive Giulietta will move to rear-wheel drive.

“We will be entering new territories and segments we’ve never been in,” Mr Wester insisted. “We needed to reset it all and simply go back to the Alfa Romeo that people admired.”

He admitted that Alfa had lost its way even before Fiat took control of it in 1987, citing its use of rebadged Nissan Pulsars and Fiat Cromas as “disrespecting the brand”.

“Alfa Romeo had completely lost its DNA back in those days and it morphed into whoever it partnered with. With the exception of style, the DNA of Alfa Romeo had not been respected.”

While refusing to give a detailed timeline (probably wise, given the German-heavy segments Alfa is targeting) for the new Giorgio-based model rollouts, he admitted the first one will arrive late next year. A mid-sized rear-drive car, it will clear a path for its seven reinforcements, which are due between 2016 and 2018.

However, sources at Alfa Romeo have indicated the range will include:

>> Two smaller cars. The Giulietta will be replaced by not one, but two models with two different body styles (a five-door hatch and a four-door sedan seems most likely, given the way the prestige B-segment is going) and the Giulietta name will be no more.

>> The first cab off the new Alfa rank will be a mid-sized sedan, designed for European consumption late in 2015 and US consumption in 2016. This was originally planned to be the Giulia and it was originally planned for this year, but the successor to the 159 (which was dropped in 2011) was culled in favour of an all-new rear-drive model. There will be a second version of the same car with a different body, much like Mercedes-Benz’s strategy with the E-Class and the CLS.

>> There will be, finally, a flagship large Alfa Romeo sedan by 2018. As CEO of both Maserati and Alfa Romeo, Mr Wester originally wanted this car to sit on the Ghibli’s architecture, but it’s far too expensive for where he wants to pitch the Alfa. It will, instead, be the biggest Giorgio model.

>> The flexibility Mr Wester insists is built into the Giorgio architecture will allow for a small SUV to sit around the Audi Q5/BMW X3/Mercedes-Benz GLK segment.

>> Wonder why Alfa has been so very poor? It, like the French, completely missed the SUV bubble. Unlike the French, Alfa continues to do so. It had tried to build a big SUV off the Jeep Grand Cherokee architecture, then tried to do one off the upcoming Maserati Levante, but it was too late for one and the other was too expensive. So this, too, will be a Giorgio model.

>> A halo sports car, most likely to compete against things like the BMW 6-Series and the Mercedes-Benz SL, it will also come from the Giorgio platform. The proposed Spider replacement, to be shared with the next Mazda MX-5, has been snaffled by the parents to become a Fiat product.