WHAT ALPINA DOES NEXT

After more than 50 years upgrading and often upstaging BMW's finest, Alpina is being taken over by the Munich mothership. Matt Prior asks its boss why he's selling up and what it means for both the Buchloe brand and its cars

- Matt Prior

It was the first time that BMW had approached the owners of Alpina to ask them if they would like to sell the brand, but the timing was astute.

"The risks for small manufacturers are going up massively," says Andreas Bovensiepen, who with his brother Florian runs Alpina, the company their father founded to tune BMWs back in 1965. "But the opportunities aren't increasing in the same way."

Over an hour with Autocar, Bovensiepen outlines the dilemma facing Alpina, which from its modest tuning and racing roots has become an independent manufacturer in its own right, making fast, luxurious and discreet cars that are 80% finished in BMW factories, owing to a close partnership with the Munich firm.

There's a burgeoning order book: Alpina sold a record 2000 cars last year and expects to repeat the feat until BMW assumes control of the brand's future at the end of 2025. But the future was becoming much harder to call.

Previously, "it was quite clear" which cars Alpina should make, says Bovensiepen, "and we always made the right choices when we made our sales estimates". But its world has changed, particularly since the Volkswagen emissions scandal.

"For companies like Alpina, it becomes more and more difficult," explains Bovensiepen. "In recent years, we had a CO2 arrangement with the European Commission for small-volume manufacturers who make fewer than 10,000 cars a year [whereby some rules are relaxed]. But these kinds of things will change or disappear, and then it gets tricky because if a big manufacturer has a big model range, they can fulfill their overall CO2 target, but we can't.”

Already in France, the Alpina B5 incurs a €20,000 (£16,845) sales tax.

While electrification is "what every politician wants", it doesn't always suit the use case for Alpina owners, who will often "use a car rather than a plane to go [the 243 miles] from Munich to Frankfurt".