We Need To Talk About The Alfa Romeo Arna, The Car That Foolishly Blended Japanese Styling And Italian Engineering

Around the turn of the 1980s, Alfa Romeo was in some fairly serious trouble. Owned by the Italian state and experiencing a spell of disastrous quality control, the New York Times reported that the struggling automaker needed to make some big moves fast to cut losses.

From The Times:

The talk of possible sales or merger involving Alfa Romeo grow out of annual losses that last year totaled more than $150 million.

Alfasud, the new plant near Naples had an operating loss of 84 billion lire – just over $100 million – last year. Alfanord, the old established plant near Milan, lost 24.5 billion lire, or just under $30 million. Expenditures arising primarily from debt service accounted for the remaining loss of about $20 million.

That works out to roughly $683 million in today’s money, a fairly shocking burn rate. No wonder Alfa Romeo was looking to get with other carmakers. While British Leyland was shacking up with Honda, Alfa Romeo found a partner in Nissan, leading to a new model called the Arna, produced under a joint venture of a similar name. Arna, like CARE Package or bagel BELT (a popular breakfast in Canada consisting of bacon, egg, lettuce, and tomato on a bagel), is actually an acronym. Say it with me, “Alfa Romeo Nissan Autoveicoli.”

What got me thinking about the Arna was yesterday’s article about Alfa Romeo’s new certification service. On paper, almost nothing could’ve gone wrong with a 50:50 joint venture between Alfa Romeo and Nissan. Imagine Italian styling and chassis zest complemented by Japanese reliability and build quality. The only way the two manufacturers could’ve cocked it up is by having Nissan do the styling and Alfa Romeo do the oily bits. Unfortunately, I have eyes, so it’s quite easy for me to discern that the Arna is shaped almost exactly like a Nissan Cherry.

That somewhat bland styling can only mean one thing – that Alfa Romeo was left to do the oily bits. Alfa Romeo didn’t have much money at the time, being a state-owned entity with slow-selling products, so it went to the fridge and dug out some of its leftovers.

Back in the early ‘70s, Alfa Romeo launched a car called the Alfasud that had two problems. The first issue is that it wasn’t initially a hatchback, so it arrived on the back foot. The second was that quality control on early models was so poor, Alfasuds would rust away right before their owners’ eyes. However, because it was an Alfa Romeo, it was said to be brilliant to drive. Its boxer engine gave it a low center of gravity, while four-wheel disc brakes were remarkably advanced for a C-segment car of the time. The suspension wasn’t anything special, just MacPherson struts up front and a beam with a Watts link out back, but the geometry was reportedly quite good, as a young Tiff Needell explains.

Alfa Romeo plucked basically everything from the cowl forwards out of the Alfasud and into the Arna. The boxer engine, the gearbox, the steering, and the suspension. However, everything behind the cowl was Nissan, which presented a problem. Factory cut-and-shuts don’t work very well even when the cars involved come from the same manufacturer. The Lexus RC uses the front section from a GS, the mid-section from the old IS convertible, and the rear section from a third-generation IS. As a result, it weighs as much as a moon and handles like one too. So how does a factory cut-and-shut work when it’s based on two completely different cars? Apparently not as brilliant as the Alfasud. British outlet Honest John reports that “Unfortunately, the suspension set-up – the ‘Sud’s strongest point – was diluted.” Yeah, that’s about what I expected.

The bland styling, diluted handling, and typical Alfa Romeo problems of the Arna led to just 53,047 being produced over a four-year production run. However, Nissan and Alfa Romeo had a valid reason to produce the Arna in Italy. Back in the early 1980s, Britain and France restricted sales of Japanese imports, so European assembly was a way of getting around these limitations. While the public never really took to the Arna, it wasn’t all bad news. The range of boxer engines borrowed from the Alfasud are still delightful to this day, and AR Online reports that the gearchange feels more precise than in an Alfasud. Despite approaching a joint venture completely the wrong way by combining the weaknesses of both manufacturers, Alfa Romeo and Nissan cooked up a car that still had some positive attributes.

So what became of the Alfa Romeo Arna? Well, in 1986, Fiat bought Alfa Romeo and the Arna was quickly phased out due to its bad reputation. These days, Arnas are extremely rare sights just about everywhere. They were largely disposable cars, used for everyday errands and scrapped when they got too much to keep on the road. It may seem strange considering the special status of many Alfa Romeos, but these were just regular cars in Europe. If you happen to see one out and about, know that they’re incredibly rare and although nowhere near as great as the Alfasud, definitely not as horrible as they could’ve been.