BMW has taken control of Alpina, so what’s next for the family that established the name?
Andreas Bovensiepen sweeps into a deserted canteen at the Salzburgring, six minutes late for our interview. I’d planned to hit him with some pithy enquiry as to the emotional toll of flogging the company his father Burkard founded, but he triggers a vibe-shift.
He reports, with some relish, that the Bovensiepen Zagato he’s just leapt out of nailed 265kph on the back straight. This makes it as quick as the slick-shod B6 GT3 they used to hammer here at Alpina events, he continues almost to himself, smiling as he pulls out a chair.
Disarming enthusiasm for the product: it affirms the notion that 63-year-old Andreas and his brother Florian were never going to take the money and slip off to yachts in the Med. The details won’t be made public, but one assumes selling Alpina to BMW, in a deal that came to fruition last year, made both men rich. Certainly it was enough to fully capitalise the new venture.
That venture is Bovensiepen Automobile, and it has an uncannily familiar feel. Home will remain the storied Buchloe site that until recently was Alpina HQ, with its workshops, saddlery, warehousing for nearly a million bottles of wine and a chalet whose swimming pool is heated by test-bench waste gas. Burkard always was a stickler for efficiency, hence the preoccupation with supersonic diesel saloons.
The firm will still provide engineering services to BMW, just as Alpina did. And it will continue to make fast, lavish, BMW-based cars, starting with the Zagato (an M4 under the carbon). The branding is new, the engineering has adapted, revenue streams will diverge and headcount will drop. But the Bovensiepens are sticking with the programme.
So why sell dear old Alpina at all? “It’s only once in a lifetime you get an offer from a company like BMW,” says Bovensiepen.
Sharpening that offer was his belief that the traditional Alpina philosophy and purely electric propulsion are wholly incompatible. It meant that, in 2020, when then BMW CEO Oliver Zipse first approached the family and everyone from Lamborghini to Bentley was pursuing an electric goal, Alpina’s future was uncertain even in terms of the basic product. Square peg, round hole.
Zipse, meanwhile, needed a brand with some star power; one that could “exploit the field” between BMW and Rolls-Royce. The deal took 18 months and was shaped by market sentiments.
“At the start, BMW’s board were considering buying the whole company,” said Bovensiepen. “But the M&A people were of the opinion that, with everything going electric, it didn’t make sense to have the Buchloe facility with its five dynos. So they came to the conclusion to only buy the market rights, which is the Alpina brand name, the history and the wheels, Deko Set, colours – this kind of thing.”
Would BMW today have elected to pick up the whole show, at a time when luxo-EV demand is stalling and regulatory deadlines are creaking? We’ll never know, but the mood is different and those five dynos don’t seem so redundant now.
“There’s still higher demand for diesels than manufacturers anticipated,” says Bovensiepen, to illustrate the point. “BMW’s home of diesel is in Austria, in Steyr, where they’ve trained a lot of engineers in an electric direction and don’t want to train them back. So they’ve turned to us.”
This sort of white-label work is one pillar of the Bovensiepen Automobile business, which will have 25 engineers fine-tuning powertrains, suspension and chassis electronics for BMW.
Another pillar is Alpina Classic, the brand rights for which have not been relinquished. It will restore and supply parts for all Alpinas of the pre-BMW era.
Buchloe will also return to being a service centre, with an emphasis on specialist cars such as the Z8 and V10-engined M5, though there will be nothing to stop locals from bringing along a 2 Series Active Tourer for oil and filters. As well they might, Alpina having engineered the suspension for BMW’s little MPV back in the day.
Then there is the wine, for which the ornate brass ‘A’ handles of the warehouse will survive (more than can be said for the charming green and blue workshop tiles). And finally there are the new and very powerful Bovensiepen cars.
The Zagato is the “lighthouse” model, but the meat of the output will be cars like the 05 GT, pictured below. This takes a 5 Series and adds power and comfort, albeit with a lighter touch than was the case with Alpinas. There is also the upholstery, of a calibre beyond the usual BMW fare. But the real story is that the donor is not an M550, as an Alpina B5 would have used, but a proper M5.
“With Alpina we were able, with the works integration [on the production line], to change a lot to our liking,” says Bovensiepen. “Now we need to take the best car in the portfolio. I won’t say every car will be an M base – for some niches a mainline BMW [is more suitable] – but we’re more in the M direction because of the power.”
Buchloe has capacity for 100 conversions annually across the board. It means the cars will be rarer than Alpinas were, and they will also command higher prices. When the last of the B5s was launched in 2018, it cost roughly £21,500 more than the BMW it was based on. Today an 05 GT will set you back £44,000 more than an M5.
But Bovensiepen believes that, even at this level, there is enough demand for an M5 with more subtlety and sophistication. And power, of course. He clearly enjoys the fact the 05 GT shades the donor car in this respect.
This is unsurprising from a man who, if pushed, will tell you his proudest achievement as Alpina boss was shoehorning a 4.6-litre V8 into the tiny E36 shell. The £320,000 ask for the Zagato has also raised eyebrows, but this is just a case of reality biting.
“You wouldn’t believe it, but it is at least as hard to earn money on a Zagato [as it is something like an Alpina B5, because it’s more than 400 new parts and up to 400 hours assembly,” he says. “Then there is the development cost, which has to be split over 99 units. The business case is tight.”
It was ever thus with cars. But it’s nice to know one of the more likeable operations in modern times will live on, if not in name then in soul.
