Hot on the heels of Alfa Romeo’s plans to unveil a new engine family, the Italian automaker says it’s going to build a small, rear-wheel-drive roadster in-house.
According to Road and Track, Alfa Romeo CEO Harald Wester says contrary to the original plan — fitting a turbocharged engine into the 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata, tweaking the styling and badging it as an Alfa Romeo Spider — the Italian automaker says the part Japanese, part Italian roadster will be sold as an Abarth model under Fiat.
The plan, originally calling for “a new roadster for the Mazda and Alfa Romeo marques based on Mazda’s next-generation MX-5 rear-wheel-drive architecture” has been in the cards since about 2012, so what gives?
Well, Fiat-Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne promised Alfa Romeos will be built exclusively in Italy, which obviously conflicts with the fact that the Miata is assembled in Hiroshima, Japan.
Not only does this mean we’ll still see the Miata’s Italian cousin eventually, but Alfa Romeo is still on track to build a two-seat roadster of its own. Wester says the Spider will instead be “a derivative of project Giorgio,” the automaker’s internal name for its upoming midsize rear- and all-wheel-drive platform.
