Why The 75 Was A Sales Success But Still Part of ALFA's Decline

hello everybody welcome to number 27 i'm jack and today i'm going to introduce you to a car that says i know i'm quite ugly but i'm also damn charming it is the alfa romeo 75. [Music] it was known as the 75 to celebrate 75 years of alfa romeo's existence and interestingly in the us it was actually known as the milano not the 75. why is that interesting well because milano is actually milan which is a town in italy in which i was born exactly well not exactly but 48 years ago [Music] i think we can say with a fair amount of certainty that this is the last real alfa romeo it was released in 1985 and fiat took over a year later in 1986. alpha had been making a loss for the previous 13 years and so you can decide for yourself whether you think that the fiat takeover was a good or a bad thing but i think by that stage the italian government had had enough and decided to offload the company incredibly alpha was actually owned by the italian government from 1933 to 1985. it must be one of the longest runs of state-owned you know state ownership for a car company anywhere um sorry for the little cross that is something that the owners the owner is italian fabio and his um grandmother insisted that you have this in the car to protect him and um used to belong to his grandfather so it's quite a nice story i guess but it's going to get in the way of the camera so let me just try and flick it back and see if we can yeah i think that's better where it is [Music] it was actually quite a success story by alpha standards because within the first three years they'd already sold 250 250 000 of them and in its seven year run so between 1985 and 19 sorry in 1992 they managed to sell close to 400 000 cars however it was part of unfortunately it was part of alpha's downward trend and i think it's quite clear if you compare it to the cars that were around at the time there were competitors for this so for example it's really mainly i guess the bmws the three series the e30 and then in the latter part of the run the e36 and they were both cars that were just so much more complete on every level in terms of quality and build they were better the ergonomics were better the design was still really good but it was much more cohesive than you get on these 75s they were just more usable they were they were better quality cars and it did show however when you get back to today um these have now started to get a cult status and when you become a classic car different things matter so first of all a lot of the issues get ironed out over time secondly things like usability and quality matter much less so they are they are pretty desirable cars despite the fact that they do have a very very odd look about them i can't make my mind up i love it from some angles hate it from others it's quite ungainly but as i mentioned in the introduction it may be ugly but oh my god does it have some character this one is a cloverleaf they were made i believe only in the latter part production so from 90 to 92. [Music] now even the standard cars technically were really quite trick things because they had perfect 50 50 weight distribution front and back that was because it's a transaxle car so the gearbox is at the back and the clutch they even went so far as to put the brakes in boards so that there was less unsprung weight the two liter and the three liter cars came as standard with limited slip diffs which i think is unheard of for a little family car cooking sort of family car like that and lastly had a de-dion rear axle at the back which although it's not fully independent rear suspension it is quite a costly solution to use and in some ways it has some advantages even over fully independent suspension so it was quite a trick thing to do at the time so as i mentioned this one is a cloverleaf not only is it a cloverleaf but the engine has been fettled by auto delta so the owner fabia was telling me that that there's a printer actually showing that it's putting out 220 horsepower so definitely more than standard it also feels to me as if the um the clutch has got a lightweight flywheel because this engine is so responsive it's absolutely that fantastic absolutely awesome okay so perhaps in terms of economics they weren't the best cars i mean one of the things that strikes you is this handbrake unbelievable what were they thinking and secondly the switches for the windows you'd think they would be here next to your left arm or right arm on this side but no these are for the rear windows for the front windows they're up at the top there really bizarre choices the glove box opens when you accelerate too hard i don't know if it would have done that as standard the interior though isn't it's not quite as it it's it's more solid than i thought it would be it's not bmw standards for sure um but it's not too bad compared to some of the fiat products at the time and i was definitely expecting worse when it first came out they made great fanfare of the computer on the 75 which was a diagnostics computer and here we have the sort of dash there it's back at the time when little techy things like that quite impress people but it's a shame really that alpha didn't put more effort into sort of quality rather than worrying about that you know the sort of gimmicky side of things oh the buso v6 it's just a magic engine these versions of the busso were actually fuel injected um it revs only to five and a half i say only five and a half because on my gta i think it was going up to six five and they can go up higher but um doesn't feel like you're missing it it revs with massive gusto now one of the areas in which this is supposed to be better than the e30 although it's not as tail happy so maybe less fun in that way is that it's so well balanced and you can feel that in corners it's absolutely lovely [Applause] [Music] the steering isn't super quick um this one's got a different steering wheel that's smaller than standard so it probably sharpens it up a little bit but it's really nice it's really pointy really well balanced the ride this has bilstein dampers so it's probably slightly stiffer than normal but the car moves around a little bit but it's lovely it irons out all the bumps you know nowhere near as stiff as some of the modern cars the driving position unbelievably is great the legs are a little bit scrunched up but the steering wheel is adjustable and definitely i'm not getting that real long arm short leg syndrome that i've got in so many italian cars of the era it's lovely really easy to heal and tow just oh that engine is just orgasmic feels so different to the one in my um in my 145. um the gearbox was one of the areas which they really said was you know one of the worst bits of the car having the the gearbox at the back obviously the linkage isn't great and it's a little bit notchy it's a little bit vague i haven't had too much problems i think third to fourth gear is fine fifth is fine i think it's first a second which can be a bit of an issue this is just amazing it's so it does feel flawed and i mean you can hear it sort of rattling around feels a little bit loose but it's just it's it's that engine [Music] so when you push on i mean don't think about lurid sort of rear wheel slides it doesn't seem to do that it's just you know you get a little bit of mild understeer but it's so it's so lovely to throw around on a proper road like this what a car so is this really the last alfa romeo and is it any good well to me it definitely is the last alpha it's quite an odd company the history that it's had and it's amazing that it survived for that long in government hands quite frankly it's sort of quite soft it leans into corners a little bit it's not ultra sharp dynamically but the engine is incredible and it's just so neutral and has so much more character than the modern stuff that i love it [Music] thank you all so much for watching as always if you have an interesting car that you want me to do a review on um please get in touch with me instagram is the best way for that and uh yeah really look forward to seeing you for the next video if you haven't subscribed please do that really helps i hope you have a great christmas and see you very soon

Channel: Number 27

Views: 99,009

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Id: BMi-ofc-mvw

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021