26 Jun 06
But first some more details. With its kicked-up haunches, the Spider's rear style is very different from the wedgier Brera's. The doors are the same but the window glass is different. The rounded tail is truncated by 20mm, has a different rear bumper and valance beneath the same rear lights, and makes for a happier side view than that of the Brera which, dramatic as it is, looks too short in the wheelbase. The boot, though hardly vast, is big enough to be useful and its lid has a brake light neatly built in.
As a two-seater, the Spider can make use of the space behind front seats for sports-car-enhancing things. There's a ledge that contains two promising-looking lockable bins, but they're disappointingly shallow. And of course there's space for the power hood mechanism and a well for the hood's storage.
It's a soft-top hood rather than a coupe-cabriolet arrangement because Alfa Romeo considers a proper Spider to be a car with a fabric roof. It also, like Jaguar with the XK, favours two distinct models rather than a single compromise, so the coupé, at least, can be the guaranteed driving machine. The hood - which moves from open to closed (or vice versa) in about 24 seconds and latches automatically to the windscreen's header rail - is in five layers including soundproofing and a plush headlining. It fits snugly, so wind noise is low; it has a glass heated rear window; and it features concealed head pads to soften the blow against its framework in a side impact.
There's the usual flip-up hood cover, incorporating fairings for the pair of roll-over bars that straddles the clear plastic wind deflector, and a glimpse into the well when the folding is in motion reveals proper soft trim inside the well and a mechanism that's largely concealed. You don't see a mass of levers, cables, pipes and wires as you do in a Volvo C70. When the roof is down, the air-conditioning automatically alters its operation to keep the fan running instead of trying to cycle itself and maintain a pre-set temperature. It's good to know the Spider is doing its bit for global cooling.
So far, then, a well-thought-out sports car. Sports car? Yes, it's a two-seater Spider, but the cheaper version has front-wheel drive (the Q4 version will have four-wheel drive) and most of the Spider's front half, albeit identical to the Brera's, is also near-identical to the 159 saloon's. In particular, that vast, Xeroxed-up dashboard seems out of place in a sports car; something leaner and keener would be better.
Alfa Romeo says the closest rivals are the BMW Z4 and (seemingly forgetting that it's defunct) the Audi TT Roadster. The Mazda MX-5 is too cheap, the Lotus Elise is too hardcore, the Boxster and SLK are too expensive. That leaves the Honda S2000 and the open Nissan 350Z. You'll notice that, apart from the Audi, all these cars have rear-wheel drive, so is the Alfa's front drive a problem for a sports car? I'd say probably not, especially as sports cars of today are no longer the stripped-out, rapid things (Elise and Caterham apart) with which you once might have indulged in some weekend motorsport. People do that in classics, hot hatches or proper racing cars nowadays. The expectation of a sports car has changed... but does the Spider meet the new needs?
