Alpina B12

This is the catalogue record of the Alpina B12, one of 31 models Alpina has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1988. 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 Alpina B12 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 Mazda Mazda MX-5, the Lexus Lexus LS — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Alpina B12 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 5.0 L BMW M70 / BMW M70 V12 / 5.7 L BMW M70#S70B56 / BMW S70B56 V12 / 5.7–6.0 L BMW M73 V12; drive goes through 4-speed ZF Friedrichshafen / ZF automatic transmission / automatic / 5-speed automatic / 6-speed Getrag manual transmission / manual / 6-speed Shift-Tronic automated manual transmi; 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.

Its place in the Alpina story

Within Alpina's own catalogue the Alpina B12 sits alongside the Alpina B10, the Alpina B10 (E39), the Alpina B10 Bi-Turbo, the Alpina B3. It was succeeded by the Alpina B7 (E65) / Alpina B6 (E63). Design is credited to class = Full-size luxury car (F-segment / F) / Grand tourer (S-segment / S). Assembly is recorded at Germany: Buchloe.

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

The catalogue records what the Alpina B12 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.