ALFA ROMEO ALFASUD

It is very unlikely that we will ever again see an advance in car design quite like the 1971 Alfa Romeo Alfasud. Over-assisted and laden with things we don’t really need, the modern 12ft long hatchback may well be safer and faster, but it’s also 40% heavier and to generate similar lateral G force it needs tyres so wide that power steering is essential.

It’s also quite unlikely that a manufacturer will make a car again that will effectively sink its parent company the way the Sud did for Alfa Romeo. Before the Sud, Alfa were a proud Milanese company making high quality and expensive saloons, coupés and sports cars – think of a BMW but with even more heritage. However, in the late 1960s times were a-changing in the motor industry. As Jaguar knew in the 1960s and Rover were to discover in the 1990s, you were either a company making 50,000 cars a year and thus ripe for a takeover bid, or you were making half a million or more cars a year.

If like Alfa you were somewhere in the middle, you were not going to make it. Quite simply, the economies of scale were increasingly against you and your profits were being squeezed if you were selling your cars at an acceptable price. Those squeezed profits were then not enough to develop new models – the XJ6 for example was designed and built using a lot of BMC money that Jaguar didn’t have. To survive into the 1970s and beyond, Alfa