At the risk of descending into cliché, we Octane types have been locked-up for a while alongside a sizeable quadruped with a trunk. Big V8s are facing their last hurrah. Manufacturers have been down-sizing for some time and are now in a race to prepare for the switch to electrification. Sure, we can continue to burn hydrocarbons for now, and hopefully we Octane types will still be able to after this decade has drawn to a close, if perhaps to a more limited extent.
But the move to battery EVs and increasingly tricky political hurdles and legislation are making life harder for niche manufacturers. Especially niche manufacturers of big, fast, V8-powered luxury saloons. And so ends the independence, after 57 years, of Alpina, which is being swallowed-up by BMW.
Obviously, Alpina relied on BMW for bodies, platforms, engines and transmissions, even if both the latter were fundamentally changed along with sufficient other hardware that Alpina could be declared a manufacturer in its own right. The two even competed, as here: the fastest, most desirable versions of the E39 5-series, in this case one tweaked, teased and transformed in-house by BMW’s M division, the other at Alpina’s Buchloe HQ. Here the similarities and differences between the two approaches to a big, fast, V8-powered luxury saloon are at their most acute. To examine and compare this particular pairing is to understand how Alpina might survive as a brand alongside M within the BMW empire.
The whole story is worth a little recap. Alpina was a family business that made
