Surprising parallels
05/09/2020
At first glance and perhaps at second glance, the two sports cars pictured - the BMW i8 on the left and the Alfa Romeo Montreal on the right - have hardly anything in common. After all, there are 50 years between the two cars: the Montreal was first presented as a production car in Geneva in 1970, and the last BMW i8 was built just a few months ago. The drive technology in particular - V8 front engine in the Montreal, hybrid drive front/rear in the i8 - hardly seems comparable.
But if you take a closer look at the BMW and the Alfa, you will find some surprising parallels.
In both cases, it was originally a show car that was primarily intended to impress aesthetically. They were both genuine styling statements that wanted to point the way.
In 1967, Alfa Romeo showed the coupé designed by Marcello Gandini at the World Expo in Montreal, while BMW presented the "BMW Vision Efficient Dynamics" concept car at the IAA in Frankfurt in 2009.
So it took three years in the case of the Alfa (and even four for the buyers) and five years in the case of the BMW before the show car became a car that you could put in your garage at home.
For both 2+2 sports cars, however, the production version remained very close to the prototypes, even if for commercial reasons one or the other had to come from the existing spare parts shelf.
Both the Alfa and the BMW rolled off the production line with significantly more powerful engines than originally presented.
However, there are also less pleasing parallels, because neither the Alfa nor the BMW sold as well as the factories had hoped and presumably little or no money was earned with them, so that they were discontinued after a comparatively short production period, in both cases after around six years.
Oh yes, there is another parallel that you could think about. The Alfa with the V8 engine and Spica injection has always been regarded as a sophisticated prima donna and the BMW, with all its technical complexity, is not exactly the dream of the home mechanic either. However, there are now sophisticated specialists for the Montreal, so let's hope that the owner of an i8 will still be able to call on the help of the necessary experts in 5, 10 or 20 years' time.
P.S. What is always surprising when you place old cars next to modern vehicles are the increased dimensions. The BMW i8 is almost 30 cm wider than the Alfa Romeo Montreal, and almost 50 cm longer, with roughly the same height. Compared to the i8, the Montreal looks almost like a dwarf in the first picture, which was taken without any tricks!
P.S.2. For once, the white one was probably the greener one in this "comparison", although of course there is plenty of room for argument ...
