A.L.F.A 12 HP
Alfa Romeo
Alfa Romeo
The A.L.F.A. 12 HP was the second car produced by ALFA, a manufacturer who would later become Alfa Romeo. The car was launched in the markets following the success of the 24 HP, first car made by A.L.F.A. It was a smaller car with a four-cylinder engine, 2,413 cc of displacement and 22 hp of power at 2,100 rpm (12 HP in model name referred instead to the fiscal horsepower. Bore and stroke were, respectively, 80 and 120 mm (3.1 and 4.7 in).
The engine was at the front, while the traction was at the back. It had a four speed gearbox and drum brakes. Both engine and body were derived from 24 HP model. The track was 1,300 mm (51.2 in) and it was available as a torpedo and saloon bodystyles. It was designed by Giuseppe Merosi. The car reached a top speed of 90 km/h (56 mph) and was on sale at 9,500 lire.
From the Wikipedia article ALFA 12 HP, CC BY-SA.
Among the 194 Alfa Romeo entries in the MotorJury library, the A.L.F.A 12 HP holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1910. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the A.L.F.A 12 HP properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1910s were the decade the automobile became an industry — Ford's moving assembly line cut the price of motoring by an order of magnitude and forced every rival to industrialise or vanish. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Ford Ford Model T, the Lion-Peugeot Lion-Peugeot Type V2C2, the Lancia Lancia Gamma-20HP — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the A.L.F.A 12 HP reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2.4 L I4; kerb weight is recorded at 920 kg; drive goes through 4-speed manual; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within Alfa Romeo's own catalogue the A.L.F.A 12 HP sits alongside the A.L.F.A 15 HP, the A.L.F.A 15-20 HP, the A.L.F.A 24 HP, the A.L.F.A 40/60 HP. The record names the successor = A.L.F.A 15 HP as its predecessor and the A.L.F.A 15 HP as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Assembly is recorded at Portello, Milan, Italy.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.
A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the A.L.F.A 12 HP was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
Tap a star. Ratings are kept on your device and feed the most-loved list.
Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.