Seemingly out of nowhere, the BMW Group announced in March 2022 that it was expanding its portfolio by acquiring the ALPINA brand name. The surprising transaction didn’t affect the existing agreement between the two companies, as the five-year deal signed in late 2020 remained unchanged. However, with December 31 fast approaching, time is nearly up.
But how did the BMW Group end up buying the niche automaker in the first place? Andreas Bovensiepen, son of the late ALPINA founder Burkard Bovensiepen, explains in an interview with Hagerty how it all unfolded. Speaking with journalist Henry Catchpole, the man in charge at the Buchloe-based company recalls that initial talks date back to 2021.
“BMW talked to us in 2021 and said: ‘Okay, the future is going electric. It will be much more electric. It will be much more difficult in the future for everybody to earn good money because everything gets more software engineered.
It gets more complex and the regulations get more and more strict. If it’s pedestrians, if it’s some supervising systems in the car. But you guys have a really cool brand with a great history and we would be interested to buy your brand.’”
So there you have it: BMW approached ALPINA, not the other way around. Andreas ultimately decided to part with the brand name while keeping the company under the ALPINA Classic banner. It now caters to approximately 40,000 surviving cars out of roughly 60,000 vehicles built in 60 years. Since 1983, ALPINA has been certified as an automaker by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Transport (BMV).
The decision to let go of the brand name ahead of an electric future does make sense. In 2021, Andreas told our sister site Bimmer Today that its customers simply weren’t interested in EVs:
“We carried out a customer survey on the subject of hybrid and EV. Our customers currently feel no demand for battery-electric models.”
But the BMW Group sees things differently. Although it hasn’t detailed its plans for the ALPINA name from 2026 onward, reports are intensifying about electric models. The 7 Series “G70” facelift coming next year will reportedly spawn an ALPINA “G72” version with an i7 70 xDrive. That’s not all. The second-generation X7 (“G67”), due in 2027, is rumored to get an ALPINA-badged “G69” variant with an iX7 100 xDrive electric range topper.
There will still be BMWs with an ALPINA touch from the Bovensiepen brothers. Andreas and Florian have founded a separate company, Bovensiepen Automobile, to build low-volume coachbuilt cars. It’s unclear whether they’ll base all of them on BMWs, but the first is a Zagato-designed coupe that actually started out as an M4 Convertible.
Video: Hagerty / YouTube
