Alfa Romeo boss Harald Wester: "We are starting from scratch"

“An important part of our job is to make the existing Alfisti happy,” he acknowledges. “It is wonderful, knowing how many people have continued to support our brand in its bad years. But there are not enough of these people available to build a strong future. We have to find more customers, and the way to do that is by providing what they want. Fancy niche models will not contribute very much to our stability.” He does not say “like the 4C” but it is clear this is what he’s thinking.

Where are these new customers? Wester slips into the ‘professor’ guise he wears rather well. Last year, he explains, around 90 million cars were sold worldwide. Nine million were premium cars – and a remarkable two-thirds of those fell into just four sectors: full-sized saloon, full-sized SUV, mid-sized saloon and mid-sized SUV. Who can be surprised that Alfa plans to launch products in these classes to build its eight-model future?

“Let’s talk Maserati for a minute,” says Wester, continuing the lesson, this time with his second CEO’s hat on (perhaps there will be time to learn something of Abarth, the third string to his busy bow). The total volume of the classes into which Maserati’s models fit makes a million sales worldwide. Of those, 550,000 are SUVs. “You can remain pure and ignore the crossover trend,” says Wester. “But if you do, you can look forward to a beautiful death.”

If his Alfa plan works, Wester says, it will right most of the company’s enduring wrongs by bringing back exciting and emotional products, greatly increasing car manufacture and car-making jobs in Italy (where the Alfas are to be made) and restoring the company to sectors where decent margins can be earned. It sounds like a kind of Italian Nirvana.

However, understanding Wester’s view of the future requires you to appreciate his view of the past: what, exactly, went wrong at Alfa. Given that he has occupied a ringside seat since joining the Fiat Group as chief technical officer in 2004 (after a short stint as Ferrari’s director of product development) his view carries an impressive ring of authority.

When did it all go wrong?

Things started going wrong as far back as 1986, he believes, when Fiat’s bosses found themselves in charge of Alfa Romeo. Understandably, Alfa’s leaders started looking for economies and synergies, instantly finding productive possibilities in the Fiat range. However, they lacked vision and “completely forgot” that one of the prime jobs of the new cars was to continue Alfa’s unparalleled heritage.

As an example of a bungled product, Wester singles out the 159 of 2005, the result of a deal between GM and Fiat that paid only minimal attention to being an Alfa. “It was a mess,” he admits, “an enormous investment in a model that wasn’t even state of the art. The past 30 years were a continuous story of over-promise and under-delivery. Some of Alfa’s managers were disrespectful to everything it stood for in the past. But now we are starting from scratch.”

When will it start going right?

When you enquire, as politely as possible, why the yearned-for renewal is only beginning now, Wester looks weary. Someone as hard working as this isn’t going to respond well to the inference that he and his colleagues have spent years sitting on their hands.

“Ten years ago, we were nearly broke,” Wester explains, “which meant we could not afford to build the products we knew were needed. On top of that, we lacked a proper distribution network, another essential for success. These things have become available recently, because of our association with Chrysler. The game is different now.”