BMW Just Relaunched ALPINA — and It Wants Your Bentley Money

The last time BMW Group launched a new brand, the iPhone didn’t exist yet. MINI came in 2001. Rolls-Royce followed in 2003. Then nothing for over two decades, until now. BMW says ALPINA is not a rebadge nor a trim level. Yet, it is not M with a different badge and softer springs, though it will inevitably get described that way.

BMW acquired only the trademark rights from the Bovensiepen family — not the company itself, which will continue servicing classic ALPINAs out of Buchloe — and has spent the past three years figuring out what to do with them. The Vision ALPINA, revealed this spring, is the first public answer to that question.

We were at Amelia Island in March for a closed-door briefing with Oliver Viellechner – Vice President BMW ALPINA, the head of BMW ALPINA, and Maximilian Missoni, the brand’s design chief. What they described is not a rebadged 7 Series with fancier stitching.

Why This Gap, Why Now

BMW’s logic for launching the brand is straightforward once you see it laid out. There is a substantial price corridor between what BMW charges for its most expensive cars and where Rolls-Royce starts — the average Rolls transaction last year was north of 500,000 euros. Bentley, Range Rover, and Maybach all sit in that corridor and are doing well there. Range Rover moved around 55,000 to 60,000 units of the full-size model last year, many configured past 250,000 euros. Ferrari, which does half of BMW’s global volume, has a higher market capitalization than BMW. There is clearly money in building fewer, more expensive cars.

The other part of the rationale is a shift in how wealthy buyers spend. Oliver Heiligendorf, who is steering the brand launch, put it plainly: high-net-worth individuals are moving toward more understated, experience-driven consumption. “There’s really a trend towards more subtle, more understated, more experience-driven consumption — and that’s great for us, because that’s exactly the direction where we will set up BMW ALPINA.”

ALPINA has always been the car for people who found M too loud and Rolls-Royce too theatrical. The buyer who knew what a B7 was and didn’t need anyone else to.

Speed, Not Sport

The two-word philosophy the team kept returning to is “speed, not sport.” Top speeds north of 300 km/h (186 mph) are confirmed for future models. Nurburgring lap times are not the target. Vmax is.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. M cars are built around the track. An M3 Competition has a character shaped by corner exit grip and steering weight at 9/10ths. An ALPINA is built around the motorway — grand touring pace, enormous reserves, and a cabin that doesn’t punish you for six hours behind the wheel. These are genuinely different things.

The Comfort Plus driving mode — ALPINA’s signature setting that goes a step beyond standard comfort — carries forward into the new brand, but Heiligendorf described it as more than a button: “It’s a guiding philosophy. Everything you touch, you feel, you hear, you experience in an ALPINA must feel up and beyond. In an ALPINA car, you never must make a single mistake somewhere where the customer might discover cheap, ugly plastics. It must be through and through perfect.”

That is a very large promise. BMW’s ability to deliver it at scale will be the real test.

What The Design Team Actually Did

Missoni and his team faced a specific challenge: ALPINA has real visual DNA — the Deko line, the multi-spoke wheels, the badge — but all of it had drifted toward generic over the years. The question was how to pull it back to something specific without resorting to retro pastiche.

Their method was to go back to the origin of each element, not its most recent version.

The Deko line, for example, turns out to be directly descended from a Fisher ski design. Buchbinder Bovensiepen liked the graphic so much that he started applying it to his cars — the same ski, incidentally, that Franz Klammer rode to the downhill gold at the 1976 Innsbruck Olympics.

The team took that original shape, slimmed it down, elongated it into something closer to a coachline, and changed how it’s applied: it’s now painted by hand under the final clear lacquer, a technique Ferrari uses for the prancing horse on its cars. On two-tone cars, the line inverts to match the secondary color. It is the kind of detail that most buyers will never consciously register, which is precisely the point.

The logo went monochromatic. The red and blue are gone. The carburetor and crankshaft from the original badge — Bovensiepen started as a tuner, not a manufacturer — are still there, cleaned up and made more abstract. When BMW published the new mark a few weeks before Amelia Island, the response was positive enough that the team felt validated in their restraint.

The 20-spoke and 5×4-spoke wheels continue, and will be exclusive to ALPINA going forward.

Missoni offered the clearest articulation of what the brand is going for: “Brands like Rolls-Royce, you probably drive to be seen. But ALPINA, you drive to be recognized.” It’s a good line. Probably too good — the kind that gets into a brand deck and then has to be proven by the actual cars.

Where It Sits In The BMW Group Family

The team was direct about the hierarchy. ALPINA will always be the most expensive vehicle in any segment it enters. The starting price for the first production cars will be above $200,000. BMW Individual is the foundation; ALPINA goes further, with factory investments in broader personalization options and showroom studio spaces where customers can specify materials in person, similar to what Rolls-Royce offers today.

ALPINA will also want a different buyer than M attracts. Heiligendorf described the target as people who currently drive Bentleys and Range Rovers, not people upgrading from an M5. That’s not a small ambition — it requires convincing buyers with no particular BMW loyalty that this brand, built on BMW platforms, at BMW dealers (or dedicated brand spaces within them), is worth choosing over established luxury alternatives with decades of their own heritage.

The differentiation from M is clear enough. The differentiation from Maybach is more interesting. Maybach layers luxury onto an S-Class, but doesn’t fundamentally change the powertrain. ALPINA’s argument is that it does both: a more luxurious car and a credibly distinct engine. “A differentiated engine is always what ALPINA started with,” Heiligendorf said. “They made 20% more power in the early days with the same engine, and they did it smart and efficient. There must be a credible differentiation in terms of performance from the core model.”

Whether ALPINA can deliver that under BMW Group cost pressures, without its own platform and with a small, selective dealer network, is the open question still, but we will find out more in 2027 how the ALPINA brand will continue to develop under the BMW leadership and guidance.