Alfa Romeo 166

This is the catalogue record of the Alfa Romeo 166, 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 1996. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Alfa Romeo 166 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1990s were the decade of refinement — airbags and ABS became universal, Japanese build quality set the world standard, and the modern SUV segment was effectively invented. 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 Škoda Auto Škoda Octavia, the Porsche Porsche Boxster, the Lotus Cars Lotus Elise — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Alfa Romeo 166 reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol engine / Petrol: / 2.0 L Alfa Romeo Twin Spark engine#16-valve Twin Spark engines / Twin Spark Multi-valve#Four valves / 16V Inline-four engine / I4 / 2.0 L Alfa Romeo V6 en; kerb weight is recorded at 1420 –; drive goes through 5/6-speed Manual transmission / manual / 4-speed ZF Friedrichshafen / ZF ZF 4HP20 transmission / Q-System Automatic transmission / automatic / 5-speed Aisin Manumatic / Sportronic ; the layout is Front-engine, front-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.

Its place in the Alfa Romeo story

Within Alfa Romeo's own catalogue the Alfa Romeo 166 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 164 as its predecessor and the related = Lancia Kappa / Alfa Romeo Bella / Trumpchi GA5 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Centro Stile Alfa Romeo: / Walter de Silva / Daniele Gaglione (facelift). Assembly is recorded at Italy: / Rivalta di Torino / Rivalta, Turin (1998–2002) / Mirafiori, Turin (2003–2007).

How this catalogue works

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.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Alfa Romeo 166 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.