Alfa Romeo · introduced 1987
The Alfa Romeo 164 (Type 164) is a four-door executive saloon manufactured and marketed by Italian automaker Alfa Romeo from 1987 to 1998, styled by Pininfarina, and cooperatively designed and sharing platforms and numerous elements with the Fiat Croma, Saab 9000 and Lancia Thema. The 164 succeeded the Alfa Romeo 90 and Alfa 6.
The 164 was followed by the 166 in 1998, after a combined production total of 273,857 units. The 164 was also the last Alfa Romeo officially sold in the United States until the 2015 launch of the Alfa Romeo Giulia. Alfa Romeo withdrew after the 1995 model year due to reliability concerns and slow sales.
From the Wikipedia article Alfa Romeo 164, CC BY-SA.
This is the catalogue record of the Alfa Romeo 164, one of 194 models Alfa Romeo has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1987. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Alfa Romeo 164 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1980s were the decade of turbocharging, electronic fuel injection and the first mass digital engine management — Group B rallying and hot hatches defined its performance culture. 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 Ferrari Ferrari F40, the Jeep Jeep Wrangler, the Subaru Subaru Legacy — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Alfa Romeo 164 reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol: / 2.0 L Alfa Romeo Twin Spark engine / Twin Spark 8V Straight-four engine / I4 / 2.0 L Fiat Twin Cam engine / Fiat 834C.146' 8V Turbocharger / turbo I4 / 2.0 kerb weight is recorded at 1200 –; drive goes through 5-speed manual transmission / manual / 6-speed Getrag manual / 4-speed ZF 4HP18 transmission / ZF 4HP18Q Automatic transmission / automatic / 4-speed ZF 4HP18 transmission / ZF 4HP; the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive / four-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. Production is recorded at 268,757 units, which makes it a solid production run.
Within Alfa Romeo's own catalogue the Alfa Romeo 164 sits alongside the A.L.F.A 12 HP, the A.L.F.A 15 HP, the A.L.F.A 15-20 HP, the A.L.F.A 24 HP. The record names the Alfa Romeo 90 / Alfa Romeo Alfa 6 / Alfa Romeo 2300 as its predecessor and the Alfa Romeo 166 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Enrico Fumia at Pininfarina. Assembly is recorded at Italy: Arese Plant, Lombardy.
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.
The catalogue records what the Alfa Romeo 164 was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in 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.
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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.