The 1978 ALPINA That Directly Inspired BMW’s New Vision Concept

After the covers came off the Vision BMW ALPINA Thursday night, BMW gave us another present the next morning. In the Mosaic Garden, parked there, under the lights, was an E24 ALPINA B7 in their iconic green. The placement wasn’t subtle. You’d just seen the future of the brand; now here was the car BMW says that future comes from.

The Inspiration From The E24 B7

The B7 Turbo was introduced in December 1978, and it was the first 6 Series car with full ALPINA conversion bearing its own identification number. The engine was based on BMW’s 3.0-liter unit, but the entire engine had been carefully rebuilt using lower-compression Mahle pistons and a new fuel injection system, and it featured variable boost control delivering between 250 and 300 horsepower.

A total of 153 cars were built over just over three years. Then, in 1982, ALPINA went further. Thirty units of the ALPINA B7 S Turbo Coupe were produced, offering 330 horsepower. The ALPINA Green example parked in the Mosaic Garden — the one the crowd gathered around after the Vision reveal — carries that B7 S Turbo designation. Its engine is the 3.5-liter B7/S inline-six based on the BMW M30B32, producing 330 horsepower and 369 lb-ft of torque at 3,000 rpm. To put that in context: it had roughly the power of a contemporary Ferrari 308, wrapped in a four-seat coupe you could use every day.

Why The Design Team Kept Coming Back To It

BMW’s design boss, Adrian Van Hooydonk said the direct reference for the Vision BMW ALPINA’s sharknose front end is the ALPINA B7 Turbo Coupe — 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 was harder to solve. BMW’s recent cars had gone either vertical or rearward-leaning at the top, and neither felt right for ALPINA. The solution came from the same source car: the E24 6 Series also has a slanted rear at this angle. That historical precedent gave the team permission to go there, and then they mirrored the plan shape front-to-back to give the car visual coherence.

The deco lines first introduced during the mid-1970s have been retained on the Vision car, but rather than being applied as external graphics, they are now painted beneath the clear coat. On the E24 in the Mosaic Garden, those lines ran along the flanks in the traditional way — narrow stripes against the green, the kind of detail that looked understated from twenty feet away and was genuinely well-executed up close.

What ALPINA Green Means For The Brand

It’s not a coincidence that the example BMW chose to display alongside its future-facing concept was finished in ALPINA Green. The color has its own history within the brand — restrained where British Racing Green is loud, distinctive without being ostentatious. It suits the E24 the way the E24 suited its era: nothing about it announces itself, but it’s very hard to ignore once you’ve noticed it. So it comes as no surprise that BMW will retain the iconic ALPINA Green and Blue for their future cars. The first production BMW ALPINA model under the new structure will be based on the G72 7 Series and is expected to debut in 2027, offered with both V8 and electric powertrains.

But the E24 in the Mosaic Garden wasn’t there to preview anything. It was there to remind you what the standard is. When you’ve seen it in person — that particular shade of green, the lines still clean after more than four decades, the nose doing exactly what van Hooydonk said the Vision’s nose is supposed to do — you understand why BMW keeps returning to it. Some cars make the argument for you. The E24 B7 has been making it since 1978.