Good news for enthusiasts of inexplicably rare-groove carmakers: the first model to emerge from the newly built stable of BMW Alpina will be a big, expensive, ultra-luxury four-door limousine. The Alpina B7 is back, and it’ll be a V8.
A V8 without a hybrid, because neue Alpina – now officially part of the BMW Group as of January 2026 – will initially stand for pure eight-cylinder power. “A combustion engine and also a V8 is a core pillar of our offering,” BMW Alpina boss Oliver Viellechner told TopGear.com.
“A pure V8 without a plug,” he added.
Pictured: the Vision BMW Alpina concept
It’ll likely be a version of BMW’s 4.4-litre V8 but heavily upgraded as has always been the Alpina way. “The engine of an Alpina can’t be the same as the engine in a base model 7 Series,” Viellechner said.
“They must be differentiated. Those are the areas Alpina stands for: powertrain, chassis, driving and so on,” he added.
We already know the default drive mode in every BMW Alpina will be ‘Comfort+’, which goes above and beyond the calibration of BMW’s own ‘Comfort’ setting. From there, the ‘Sport’ and ‘Sport+’ modes have been junked in favour of ‘Speed’ and ‘Speed+’, which gives you some indication as to how Alpina is being pitched.
Not just in terms of the physical driving experience, but also in philosophy. “We won’t talk about volumes,” Viellechner told TopGear.com when asked on how many cars it’s expecting to sell, “but we will steer Alpina very differently from BMW.
“We will look much more towards Rolls-Royce. Yes, [Alpina production in the past] was limited, but it was limited geography, so one thing we will definitely change is [to make it] a global offering.
“That gives a slightly different size of volumes, but we’re not changing that dimension substantially. It will continue to be really exclusive and limited,” he said.
Alpina design boss Max Missoni added: “You can be rare in single markets. We will not deliberately be rare, because if there’s demand, that’s great. It’s more about having a wider scope [as a result of being in the big BMW ecosystem] but still being very careful where you start.”
Looking further into the future, there’ll likely be electric Alpinas, too. “We believe we will need non-combustion variants going forward,” Viellechner told TG. “It will not be so relevant at the beginning, but we will also find it difficult to launch a combustion-only brand these days.
“If you look to markets like China for example, I could not see that as the right strategy.”
And what about a strategy that includes the smaller Alpinas like the B3 and B5 that we all know and love? “Definitely not at the start,” he said. “I think long-term the brand has the potential to, but it will be wrong to do that at the start. And not as the immediate second step either because it’s quite a stretch.”
But it’s something that he’s not ruling out. “I believe the approach of refinement and chassis and powertrain differentiation works in every segment,” he said. “Today for example, a B3 GT Touring is being sold in Munich for 130,000. A 3 Series, for 130k, is for me another strong signal, because some markets are just looking for smaller cars.
“Japan, for instance, is a very good example. 500 Alpinas are being sold there every year, with 400 being a 3 Series or an X3,” he added.
He also looks at the US when it comes to the pricing of all new Alpinas – again, he wouldn’t say exactly how much they’d cost, noting only that they’d start where the most expensive BMW stops, and end just before a Rolls-Royce kicks off. A big, lucrative bit of the car market swimming with ‘ultra high net worth individuals’.
“The US is for me quite interesting,” he said, “because there Alpina only offered the luxury class – the B7, B8, XB7 – and those models are selling at $200,000 with essentially no discount.
“That signals there is already a good potential. I think after that the other ingredients are a strong community and building great desirability.”
That desirability will partly rest in BMW Alpina’s focus on individualisation – only select BMW dealerships around the globe will be allowed to sell Alpinas (and there’ll be special areas in the showroom for it), while select BMW factories will be upscaled to deal with the depth of bespokerisation that’ll be on offer.
“We’re much more separate from BMW than M is,” said Viellechner, “and nurturing this community is very important to Alpina.”
