BMW Put The 1978 ALPINA That Inspired Its New Concept Right Next To It

After BMW pulled the covers off the Vision BMW ALPINA on Friday night at the 2026 Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, the second act came quietly, in daylight, in the Mosaic Garden. Parked there, under the sun, was an E24 ALPINA B7 in ALPINA Green. The placement was not accidental. You’d just seen what BMW wants the future of the brand to look like. Now here was the car they say that future comes from.

Why The B7 Was There

Design boss Adrian van Hooydonk cited the B7 Turbo Coupe by name as the primary design reference for the Vision BMW ALPINA’s shark nose front end — the E24 6 Series with the extreme nose and deep plan view. “This one takes it even further,” he said. “It’s even more acute, even more extreme, more sculptural, more three-dimensional.”

The rear of the concept also came from the same source car. BMW’s recent cars had gone either vertical or rearward-leaning at the top, and neither felt right for ALPINA. The E24 6 Series has a slanted rear at this angle, and that historical precedent gave the design team permission to go there. They then mirrored the plan shape front-to-back to give the concept visual coherence.

It is a more honest way to do heritage than most brands manage. Rather than slapping a chrome badge on something and calling it a nod to the past, BMW brought the actual car and put it ten feet from the concept. Here is what we looked at. You can see it for yourself.

Why Was The B7 Important For ALPINA?

The B7 Turbo was introduced in December 1978, and it was the first 6 Series car with a full ALPINA conversion bearing its own identification number. Only 153 examples of the B7 Turbo Coupe were built between 1978 and 1982, with a final 30-unit B7 S Turbo producing 330 horsepower from a 3.5-liter inline-six.

330 horsepower from a turbocharged inline-six in 1982 was not a small number. ALPINA was not softening BMW’s products in those years; they were extracting something the factory engineers either couldn’t or wouldn’t. The shark nose was part of that identity — aggressive enough that it read as genuinely different from the standard E24, not a trim variation.

2026 also marks half a century since the E24 6 Series came out, which made the choice to place the B7 in the Mosaic Garden feel less like a PR stunt and more like something the people making the Vision car actually cared about getting right.

What Carries Forward Into The Vision Concept

The front end of the Vision BMW ALPINA references the shark nose associated with earlier ALPINA models. A six-degree feature line runs from the lower front corners, along the sides of the car and around the rear. ALPINA-style deco-lines also appear, but painted beneath the clear coat rather than applied as external graphics.

The two-door coupe format is there too. The Vision BMW ALPINA is a four-seat grand touring coupe at 5,200 mm long with a V8 engine, positioning BMW ALPINA above M and squarely against Bentley and Maybach. ALPINA built its reputation making the 6 Series and 7 Series faster and quieter in equal measure — always a grand touring brief, never a track car brief. The B7 was the purest expression of that, and the Vision concept is the first time BMW has tried to continue that logic entirely on its own terms.

Whether they’ve actually got it right is a question that won’t have an answer until the first production BMW ALPINA arrives in the future. But putting the B7 in the garden the morning after the reveal was the clearest possible statement of intent: this is not us making up a heritage, it’s us looking at something real and trying not to ruin it.