The Alpina B10 Bi-Turbo is a high performance version of the BMW 5 Series (E34) executive car manufactured by German automobile manufacturer Alpina. Beginning production in 1989, the B10 Bi-Turbo was based on the 535i and received several upgrades by Alpina, being the fastest production sedan in the world at the time of its introduction.
Production ended in 1994 with 507 examples produced. Developed at a cost of US$3.2 million, the B10 Bi-Turbo was introduced at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1989.
From the Wikipedia article Alpina B10 Bi-Turbo, CC BY-SA.
Among the 31 Alpina entries in the MotorJury library, the Alpina B10 Bi-Turbo 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.
To read the Alpina B10 Bi-Turbo 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 Lexus Lexus LS, the Mazda Mazda MX-5, the Subaru Subaru Legacy — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Alpina B10 Bi-Turbo reads like this: the record lists its engine as 3.4 L twin-turbocharged BMW M30 I6; kerb weight is recorded at 1695 kg; drive goes through 5-speed Getrag 290 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 Alpina's own catalogue the Alpina B10 Bi-Turbo sits alongside the Alpina B10, the Alpina B10 (E39), the Alpina B12, the Alpina B3. The record names the successor = Alpina B10 4.0 (E34) as its predecessor and the Alpina B10 4.0 (E34) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to class = Executive car (E). Assembly is recorded at Germany: Buchloe.
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 Alpina B10 Bi-Turbo 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.
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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.