Alpina D3 Biturbo - long term review

As Alpina becomes engulfed by BMW, we're throwing it back to 2009 and remembering six months with a modded diesel saloon. This article was originally published in Top Gear Magazine, April 2009

Can a four-cylinder diesel car ever be – to use a fine German pigeon-English word – ‘sportive’? I’ve never heard one that sounded particularly ‘sportive’. At best they are deep and characterless and at worst, rattly, buzzy and wheezing. ‘Sportiveness’ doesn’t compute in the way these engines only rev to about 4,500rpm either, with the only zone that gives a proper ‘sportivity’ shove existing between about 1,500 and 2,500rpm. Hmm.

This is a tough sell, but if any car is going to be able to do it, it’ll be this one: the Alpina D3 Biturbo saloon, which I’ll be testing over the next six months. Looks ‘sportive’, doesn’t it? But it’s a four-cylinder diesel, so maybe it’ll be struggling to properly exude genuine ‘sportivityness’. We’ll see.

The heart of it is the engine: it’s an Alpina-tweaked 2.0-litre twin-turbo BMW unit that, for now at least, only appears in the 123d among ‘normal’ BMWs. In that car it develops 201bhp and 295lb ft of torque. In the Alpina, it’s up to 214bhp and 331lb ft, so six and 11 per cent respectively: 0-62mph is 6.9secs, same as a Golf GTI, yet it’ll return 52.3mpg on the official combined cycle. A performance car for the times, then. Smart.

Oh, and I perhaps should have mentioned earlier, Alpina is a racing and tuning firm that’s been working closely with BMW for 40 years on road and track, fitting either tweaked or bespoke engines to 3, 5, 6 and 7 Series Beemers and making them handle better and doing it all bloody well.

List price for the D3 Biturbo manual saloon is £29,950 (£31,585 for the auto). The car is made on BMW’s production line, with Alpina-spec suspension, body kit and interior bits going on there, and wheels later. Because of the complicated way Alpina orders its cars from BMW, the spec on the cars is set, unless you’re prepared to pay a £1,500 option fee over and above the cost of the extras. So, you can have what you want from BMW’s catalogue, but you start with that fee. It sounds mad but it keeps the price of the car down.

I like the standard spec just fine. It has no frippery like auto wipers and auto lights. There is a pretty basic single-disc stereo, no nav or iDrive, some perfectly excellent half-leather bucket seats with manual adjustment other than electric side bolsters, and normal aircon rather than climate control.

Little Alpina touches in the cockpit include blue dials, a numbered plaque and bespoke trim material. Tinted glass is £250 and the excellent silver Alpina stripes are £350. Both are worth having. The superb 19in wheels come as standard.

When I picked the D3 up from Sytners in Nottingham, home of Alpina in the UK, it only had five miles on the clock. I’m running the car in at the moment. Initial impressions are good. Quiet, smooth riding and quick to change direction. It’s possible it might be quite ‘sportive’. We’ll soon see...