Remember when Alfa Romeo thought it could win over American buyers lusting after BMWs with a wedge-shaped sedan that had power window switches on the roof?
After years of selling Spiders and GTVs with limited success, Alfa Romeo took its compact 75 sedan and brought the U.S. the Milano. Despite it being a four-door, five-seat sedan, the Alfa has Italian quirks no American would ever put up with. Why is the trunk so small? Why do you have to have ridiculously long arms to drive it? You can understand why it didn’t catch on.
Yet here, John Davis from Motorweek takes us through the 1988 Milano 3.0. Suddenly, the sharp angles seem delightfully ’80s. Getting from a stop to 60 mph in 8 seconds sounds pretty decent even for today’s times. And it’s a rear-drive four-door sedan with a manual transmission that isn’t a 3-series. Now you might ask, how did these not catch on?
Alfa Romeo is due to release a spiritual successor to the Milano soon in the form of a new rear-drive compact executive sedan that’s supposed to, naturally, restart the brand in the U.S.
I’d forget about the Milano were it not for the fact I spotted one in San Francisco traffic just last month and see one every now and then in online car searches. The Alfa Romeo Milano is a car that makes a Saab 900 Turbo seem sensible and boring to own, and I like that in a car.