Monday, January 18, 2010

What's wrong with the Alfa Romeo 8C?

The Alfa-Romeo 8C is certainly one of the design master pieces of the last decade. It's gorgeous, no doubt. It was the star at many car shows and it's probably on the wish list of many many Alfisti waiting to win in the lottery. Despite the fact that only 500 cars (Coupés) were produced and got distributed "by hand", it is not difficult to buy one today. I would estimate that roughly one fifth of all the cars are on the market currently. Only looking at three online classifieds platforms I already found more than 50 and quite a big share actually being offered from the UK. So what's wrong with this car? Maybe it's not the car, but the financial crisis. But even if that's the case, listening to people who know or should know, the car is not really a "low maintenance" toy. And in my eyes it got way too expensive. It was initially "announced" for less than 100k € and finally was sold for at least 50% more than this. The convertible version is with more than 200k € even more expensive. Maybe, together with the rather average handling (see for example the TopGear test, see 4:00 and later), it was just too much? I am sure there would be a market for such a car in the 70-90 k€ segment, maybe with a smaller and lighter six cylinder engine (not the Holden/GM version, please) and with less carbon fiber and electronic gimmicks. I would probably put my name on the list. But not for 200k € plus and knowing it's some sort of a prototype where you are the test driver. For this it's way to complicated.

2 comments:

John L said...

Looks nice though.

lupoch said...

Wanna-be-speculators that just got the timing wrong?