Alfa Romeo SZ

Among the 194 Alfa Romeo entries in the MotorJury library, the Alfa Romeo SZ 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 1989. 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 SZ 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 Subaru Subaru Legacy, the Lexus Lexus LS, the Mazda Mazda MX-5 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Alfa Romeo SZ reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2959 cc Busso 12V V6; quoted output is 210 PS; kerb weight is recorded at 1260 kg (SZ) / 1380 kg (RZ); top speed is given as 245 km/h; drive goes through 5-speed manual; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive. Worked together, those figures give roughly 167 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. 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 1,036 units, which makes it a limited-production machine by any standard.

Its place in the Alfa Romeo story

Within Alfa Romeo's own catalogue the Alfa Romeo SZ 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. Design is credited to Centro Stile Fiat: / Robert Opron / Antonio Castellana. Assembly is recorded at Italy: Terrazzano di Rho (Zagato).

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.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

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.

From catalogue to ownership

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 Alfa Romeo SZ was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.