The Alfa Romeo RZ Is One of the Strangest 1990s Sports Cars

this is a 1993 alpha romeo rz and it is one of the strangest sports cars of the 1990s that's partially because of its looks as you can see it's not exactly a traditional looking car in fact nothing about this car is traditional and today i'm going to review the rz and show you what i mean [Music] before i get started be sure to check out cars and bids which is my enthusiast car auction website with cool cars from the modern era and big news cars and bids is celebrating its one-year anniversary our first birthday and to celebrate we're giving away free listings for the entire month of june if you submit your car for sale on cars and bids use the discount code birthday to get a free listing valid the entire month of june on cars and bids celebrating one glorious year of cars and bids the coolest car auction website with the best cars from the modern era check it out cars and bids.com i've borrowed this car from a viewer here in the los angeles area and i'm going to start with a little background now back in the 1980s alfa romeo had a sports car it was called the spider it had been in production for a long time it was well known and well loved but alpha wanted something more something more exciting more thrilling more head-turning that would get people talking so they created this as you can imagine it certainly got people talking a coupe version came first it was called the s z or sprint zegato and it debuted in the late 1980s strangely this car was not designed by zagato which is known for their design work instead it was built by zagato but designed by alfa romeo so it had the whole process backwards there anyway a few years after the coupe came out they debuted this the convertible version which they called the rz which stood for roadster zagato unfortunately it didn't last long zegato was nearly bankrupt and the factory closed down after building just around a thousand coupes and about 250 convertibles like this one all sz and rz models used a 200 horsepower v6 a five-speed manual transmission and rear-wheel drive and although these were never officially sold in north america they are now old enough to legally import so they've started to trickle in with prices for nice ones approaching a hundred thousand dollars that may seem like a lot of money for a curiosity but oh what a curiosity it is and today i'm going to show you everything first i'm going to take you on a thorough tour of the rz and show you all the quirks and features of one of the strangest modern italian cars and that's saying a lot then i'm going to get it out on the road and drive it and then i'll give the rz a doug score all right i'm going to start the crux and features of the rz with probably its biggest quirk and that's saying a lot that would be its design its styling this is a very strange looking car you start up front with these weird six headlights and the alpha grille which just doesn't integrate all that well this flat hood and then you have this rising belt line that just rises and rises and rises to the back of the car where it then just stops abruptly there's no good ending there's no beautiful tie into the rear it just ends like a block like a square like an suv or frankly a pickup truck bed it just stops back there certainly doesn't have the lines of a beautiful italian sports car like you think when you think alfa romeo convertible this is not what originally comes to mind it certainly doesn't help that you have that rear wheel kind of inset a little narrower than the body which gives the effect of making the car look plump or chubby kind of a little too wide for the platform that it's on not a good look when you already have some questionable angles speaking of angles undoubtedly the worst is this rear three-quarters view where you have the square block at the back of the car just staring at you it really does not look all that good amazingly i think the coupe the s-z actually looks worse you can see it here i'm not exactly sure why can't quite put my finger on it but something about adding a roof to this car just doesn't do it any more favors it's just a really non-attractive vehicle frankly and it's not like this car was part of some design trend at the time in the 1980s you had wedge-shaped sports cars which this isn't and then in the 90s you had flowing curves nobody was really building blocky humpback convertibles and goops but alpha was but anyway let's move on because with the rz the quirks just keep on coming i want to start with getting in and i have to say i love the key you can see the alpha key has a clover on it that was an old-school alpha symbol back from the brand's racing days it was a good luck charm and it's funny that they've carried it through even to the modern era but i like to see it on the key once the car is unlocked you walk up and you can see the door handles a little unorthodox you put your hand into this indent in the body and pull on this piece and that is how the door opens definitely a strange handle now once you have the door open you can see it doesn't really open all that far this is this car's doors fully and completely open as far as they go why not make them open further i'm not really sure it's just the decision they made one of many questionable decisions but if you want to talk about a non-questionable decision here's something i love when you open the door you have alfa romeo printed in the door cylinder and it's like embossed into the body work it looks really really cool i wish more cars went to such great lengths to make you pleased with your automotive manufacturer when you open the door it really does look cool but anyway we get inside the rz and there are a lot of quirks to cover here but i want to talk about the roof procedure because it stands out as an especially bizarre one okay i couldn't figure it out i couldn't figure out how to put the roof up or down but then i found the owner's manual now one surprise here the owner's manual comes in an rz leather pouch they only made 250 280 of these cars yet they managed to print up specific pouches just for the rz not something that was shared with the sz or a general alfa romeo pouch i find it very odd and when you open it you can see the actual owner's manual again is specifically intended for just the rz not the s z and the rz only the convertible that in itself is kind of a questionable decision because i'm sure it cost a lot more to make specific manuals for just 250 cars but it's the decision that alfa romeo and zigato decided to make but anyway you open up the owner's manual and it is surprisingly helpful in teaching you how to raise or lower the roof except for the fact that it's all in italian with that said just from the pictures i could clearly tell it had something to do with this switch in the center console which by the way is unlabeled there are five switches in the center console four of them are labeled but the one that has something to do with the roof that one completely unlabeled they decided not to stick any sort of diagram on there letting you know what it does smart thinking alfa romeo but anyway i was pressing and pressing this button and it wasn't doing anything and i just couldn't figure out what the problem was so i texted a picture of this owner's manual to my friend felipe who speaks italian and he said you gotta start by turning off the car now this is a manual convertible top there's no power involved but for some reason even though it's a manually operated top the car can't be on when you do the top procedure anyway turned off the car pressed the button and instantly this little cover in back popped open so i knew i was on the right track from there there's a little release to actually open the cover and access the top where is the release you ask behind the driver's seat and you can't access it with the driver's seat in this position in order to actually get to the release for the top you have to fold the driver's seat back forward so how do you do that well the seat folder is on the inside of the seat next to the center console you pull on that and that folds the seat forward even though every other car with a folding seat back in history has this latch on the outside of the seat not the rz you have to reach in and fold the seat forward but anyway once you've done that then you can access this little tab you can pull and that will release the roof cover but it is worth noting at this point that in order to put the roof down in your car you had to not only turn it off but fold the driver's seat forward so you're sitting at a stop light and you're like hmm it's a kind of a sunny day i wish i had the top down you can't just put it down at the stop light no no you have to pull into a parking lot turn the car off fold the driver's seat forward and only then can you access the top this is high quality design let me just tell you but anyway once you've gotten everything into this position you've released the cover in back you've pushed on this little tab you can open the rear cover and that reveals the convertible top finally you have gotten to this point where you can put on the roof and from there it's a pretty straightforward process although there are still a couple of little interesting quirks to start you basically lift the top out of the top area and then you fold it forward and then it meets the windshield although this is pretty much as you probably would expect but there is a bit of an issue because how do you close this rear cover and drive the car if the top is in this position well after you've already folded the top all the way forward you then have to fold this back piece up so that you can get this cover back down in place and then the back part of the top actually latches on to this rear cover and then it's locked in place and from there you're still not done there are little tabs that you have to get in place in order to lock the top onto the windshield and only then is the roof completely in place and you're done then you can put the driver seat back turn the car back on and drive away what should be a simple manual top process takes like two and a half minutes and once you're done putting the roof on you can clearly see from this angle the car doesn't look any better with the top in place in fact in my opinion it looks decidedly worse with the top up than with the top down you've just made an ugly car uglier although now you do have some protection from the rain and the sun and whatever but it is certainly not a good look with the top down and it is really not a good look with the top up now i'm going to put the top back down but i'm not going to go through every little step of the procedure it's basically the same thing in reverse and it just takes forever you don't really need to hear all the steps again but you can watch me do it [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] but anyway aside from the roof and the design this car still has a lot more quirks and features to cover i'm going to start in here in the center console now you can see the space between the seats is painted red and it kind of brings one line down from the rear deck lid in through the center console all body colored and it looks pretty cool strangely enough this middle piece with the speaker on it can fold down i have no idea why it doesn't open it doesn't really do anything i guess maybe it could be an arm rest i'm not really sure but you can fold it down if for some reason that's something you decide you want to do next up another interesting quirk in here is the climate vents you have two vents in the center like most cars but then you have two over on the side and then you have two over on the other side right on top of each other so you have six total climate vents in this interior even though this is a very small two-seater vehicle not sure they're all necessary but they're all there next up another notable item in the center console you can see on the left side you have two switches with like a shock absorber that is to control the suspension the suspension system in this car was borrowed from a race car an actual imsa race car and so you could dial firmer or more comfortable ride depending on the type of driving you were doing with these little switches that was pretty forward thinking for the time period actually and it's interesting to see them there and in that vicinity next to the suspension switches you have a little plaque that reads number 130 rz i guess that's because this is the 130th rz built now like i said they didn't make many of these zegato built about 250 before they went into receivership they had no money and then the receiver built an extra 30 or so i'm not exactly sure how with the same workers cobbled together with parts i wouldn't want one of those cars but this is relatively in the middle of production at number 130 and i guess each car got a numbered plaque letting you know which it was and for our next quirk we move on to the climate controls which are extremely bizarre to start you have three big dials nothing weird there a lot of climate control systems have three dials but they don't do what you'd think the one on the left directs the airflow pretty standard but the other two one controls your heat and one controls your cold air so you could theoretically turn the heat and the cold all the way up at the same time almost every other car has these on separate dials you have to choose one or the other but not the rz you can do both so the question of course is what happens if you turn up the heat and the cold which does it prioritize i have no idea and i have no idea why that's even a possibility another weird thing about the climate controls is that printed on the face plate for the climate controls is a diagram showing the climate controls you can see the three big dials on the left and then the two little ones on the right you'll notice right below this diagram there's a little windshield defogger icon here this diagram shows the precise position that every single control must be in in order to turn on the windshield defogger in most cars you push a button to turn on the defogger in this car you want the defogger you gotta turn five dials to the exact right positioning smart next up an interesting quirk over on the passenger seat you can see there's this little loop sticking up from the seat bottom that is a grab handle if your driver is going really fast and you're getting scared you grab onto the door and you grab onto this handle in your seat and you hold on for dear life that's an interesting placement of that handle speaking of driving very fast i love the steering wheel in this car it looks like an old-school racing car steering wheel it has a nice look and i shape a nice feel to it in the center you have the horn you push it and it sounds strangely a normal sounding horn take a listen that is just about the only normal thing in this entire interior and that point is driven home when you start to consider storage because there is pretty much none in this vehicle you do have a glove box but as you can see very minimal you can't get much more in there than like an envelope with your registration paperwork you don't have storage in the center console you don't have storage on the door panel you don't have storage pretty much anywhere else but you're probably thinking well that's okay this car has a gigantic square rear end so it has a huge trunk and indeed there is a trunk back there although the only way to access it is with this little switch next to the driver seat you push that and the trunk pops open there is no latch in the back in the trunk area there is no keyhole to release the trunk you have to walk up walk into the car press this little switch and only then can you gain access to your trunk for your cargo but don't get too excited about your cargo space just yet it turns out when you get into the trunk first off it folds open like this it's hinged at the bottom this is how you open the trunk and when you open it it only opens this far this is as far as it goes the only trunk opening you get is like eight inches wide which would be a problem except for the fact that this isn't actually a cargo area at all you can see back here you have the spare tire mounted here and some miscellaneous wiring and that's all there's no room to actually store cargo in the cargo area of this vehicle this is not intended to be a trunk or a cargo area in any capacity it just opens so you can access the spare tire and wiring if you need to so like i said to reiterate there is no cargo area in this vehicle pretty much anywhere except of course for your glove box now with that said i will say if you push the front seat forward you could store stuff behind the front seat and sort of below the resting position of the roof when it's down but that's not really an official spot and i could see stuff rolling around back there and getting lost nonetheless it pretty much is your only storage opportunity if you want to load any luggage in this car unless you want to use the passenger seat but anyway since i'm on the outside of the rz let's talk quicks and features of the exterior beyond just the overall design first let me close the trunk first off i want to start with the badge which as you can see r z a red badge on a red car interesting a little bit unusual and kind of strange but nonetheless that's the choice they decided to make i wouldn't have done it myself but one thing i do love is on the wheels you can see the valve stem caps have the alfa romeo clover again they didn't go all out with clover logos which would look tacky but they put them in these little places and i love when they pop up now another interesting item back here is the tail light situation you have this giant tinted light bar across the entire rear of the car and you can see this includes the brake lights the turn signals and in the middle you have the reverse lights this is where all your rear lighting is a blocky square rectangle thing perfectly fits the blocky square look of the back of the rz and speaking of unusual lighting the front of this car certainly qualifies you have eight individual lights up here four on each side which contributes to this car's strange look although i must say it has a bit of a bugatti chiron vibe which has sort of a similar lighting pattern the rz had it first although the shiron has it better anyway as for these lights on the outside of course you have the turn signal of the three inside lights in the middle you have the parking light on the outside you have the regular headlights the driving lights and on the inside you have the high beams each separated into their own special area to create eight lights in the front of this car and next up since i'm in front let's talk engine we're gonna start with opening the hood which is a little bit weird to start the process there's a latch in the driver's foot well like basically every car then next you have to stick your hand into the alfa romeo grill in order to unlatch it in front once you do that it is a very heavy piece this is a large heavy hood you open it up and there is a hood prop now the prop looks like it should go over here you can see there's some damage from people trying to put the prop in that place over the years but that is not actually where it goes instead it goes right in the middle to balance the hood so it doesn't sway to one side and potentially bend and then you have access to the engine this is alfa romeo's v6 it was called the buso v6 and it powered an enormous amount of alphas and launchers and other vehicles from the late 70s to the early to mid 2000s there were various different sizes of it evolutions changes that turbocharged it at one point but this engine got into dozens of different vehicles and it basically kept italy running for decades this v6 powertrain and here it is in the rz like i said makes about 200 horsepower not a huge figure but then again this isn't exactly a huge car just an ugly one and finally one other interesting quirk under the hood here you can see in the very back there is printed a blue z that is the zegato logo again zegato built this car and there's not a lot of zagato logos throughout so it looks like they signed it there trying to make someone somewhere aware of the fact that they built a car but it looks like they signed it in like hand-drawn paid like the kind of thing a child would do after finishing artwork in the fourth grade but there's a z for zegato now that brings me to one of this car's strangest things which was its production process like i mentioned before zegato built it alfa romeo designed it and that's really weird because zegato is known for their design and alpha of course is a car manufacturer so you'd think they'd be the ones to build it but they flip-flopped it for this car and so zegato is always blamed for the appearance of this vehicle because everyone knows they're associated with it but it wasn't really their fault they only had some say in the design they simply built it and then they went bankrupt and so those are the quirks and features of the highly quirky alfa romeo rz now it's time to get this out on the road and see how it drives all right driving the rz i have always wanted to experience one of these and check it out and i'm thrilled that i am today first thing i noticed my eye line is directly looking at the wind frame it's not really the best design i have to either go under or over frankly actually works but straight ahead doesn't really work now on the surface 200 horsepower v6 probably doesn't seem all that powerful to you and that's correct but this is not a big car i can reach to the end of it frankly it's really a tight little small car and so it doesn't have a lot of stuff to move around and this particular one has only 15 500 kilometers i assume and so it's not exactly worn out or anything you're really going to be able to feel how much power that delivers it's actually kind of fun great gear action uh shifter clutch feels really good there's some play on the shifter the clutch is a little vague but for a car from this era i'm actually really impressed one of the better 90s uh clutch shifter situations i've driven then again it's important to remember alpha knew how to make sports cars back in this period the spider is still regarded from this era as one of the coolest sports cars uh and so this car was just sort of an even more exciting and more thrilling alpha sports car it's actually surprisingly fun to drive now i admit it doesn't feel powerful i was thinking oh 200 horsepower and a car this size like i mentioned before oh it's gonna be fine it's fine but it's not incredibly fast but that wasn't really alpha's thing the spider was the same way the cars weren't intended to be fast they were just supposed to be fun it's actually kind of funny because i've thought about this car a lot over the years it's one of the really weird quirky 90s cars but i've never really thought about what it's like to drive i always think why does it look that way why did they style it like that but now that i'm in it it's actually kind of fun and one of the other big benefits of being in this car is you don't have to look at it the real benefit though is in certainly in the handling and the steering it is a tossable feeling car easy to rev up the engine revs pretty quick i'm surprised i'm actually surprised um i always just assume you know this car is only famous for how it looks and and how quirky and bizarre and weird it is and all the stuff i showed you before that's what everybody knows it for what nobody talks about this with this car is how it drives i think that's because there are so few not that many people have driven them but everybody's seen one and laughed at it but in all honesty i think it drives pretty well it's not that fast but it's fun it's tossable it's responsive it's a cool little toss about roadster and i think that was what alpha was going for something that was more exciting more thrilling faster than the spider and they certainly did that and this car is a lot more dramatic although maybe not for better one last interesting tidbit with these car values are definitely going up even though these were definitely the ugly duckling alpha for a long time they just didn't make that many of them and in today's world special cars low production cars are becoming more and more sought after and uh they're finally becoming legal in the states so people here who want something a little different from every other italian car from what their friends have they're starting to gravitate towards these the owner of this car has a lamborghini yarama a ferrari boxer a lot of cool special 70s 80s type cars and he also has two of these the convertible and the coupe he's a designer and he told me this was kind of a moment in time that he felt it was worth having and he really wanted one for years and now that they're legal he's pursued that there's not too many of them but they're starting to trickle in and they're starting to get more expensive and so that's the alpha romeo rz this is a weird and interesting and quirky car and i have always wanted to check it out this car certainly won't win any awards for its beauty but for people like me who are into weird and unusual oddball cars this is one of the holy grail right up there with the aston martin lagonda and the vector and now it's time to give the rz a doug score starting with the weekend categories and styling this is weird i like it to be clear i think it's charming weird but man is it weird and for most people it's weird verging on ugly it gets a 4 out of 10. acceleration does 0 to 60 in 6.9 seconds and it gets a 2 out of 10. handling is good and actually surprisingly so and it gets a 6 out of 10. fun factor is also higher than i expected it drives nicely and it's a fun experience with the roof down and it gets a 6 out of 10. cool factor is higher still these are head turning and very exciting to car enthusiasts this would certainly draw a crowd at cars and coffee and it gets an 8 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 26 out of 50. next up are the daily categories and features it doesn't have much and it gets a 2 out of 10. comfort is fine and it gets a 4 out of 10. quality is ok the interior is acceptable i guess but reliability is obviously a concern given its age and alphaness and it gets a five out of ten practicality is low given the two seats in the trunk situation and it gets a two out of ten finally value and these are more expensive than you think figure 50 to 70 000 for a nice one that's big money for a questionable looking car with relatively low power but at least it can be expected to hold its value reasonably and it gets a 6 out of 10 for a total daily score of 19 out of 50. add it up and the doug score is 45 out of 100 which places it here against well i don't know the rz has no competitors this is the closest stuff i could come up with i have no idea if it does badly or if it's the wrong competition but here's where it scores what a bizarre vehicle in the best way possible [Music]

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 842,602

Keywords: alfa rz, alfa sz, alfa romeo rz, alfa romeo sz, alfa romeo rz review, alfa rz review, alfa romeo sz review, alfa sz review, alfa sz rz, alfa romeo rz video, doug demuro, demuro, doug de muro

Id: Z0STPzChLTU

Length: 28min 11sec (1691 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021