Alpina B3

The Alpina B3 is one of 31 Alpina models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 2007. 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 B3 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 2000s were the decade of electronics — stability control, dual-clutch gearboxes and the first serious hybrids arrived while platform-sharing consolidated the industry into a handful of giants. 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 Hyundai Hyundai i30, the Nissan Nissan GT-R, the Volkswagen Volkswagen Tiguan — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Alpina B3 reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol: / 3.0 L BMW N54 / N54 twin-turbocharged straight-6 engine / I6 / Diesel: / 2.0 L BMW N47 turbocharger / turbo diesel straight-4 / I4; kerb weight is recorded at Saloon: 1645 kg (dry) / 2090 kg (with fluids) / Wagon: 1750 kg (dry) / 2200 kg (with fluids) / Coupé: 1570 kg (dry) / 2090 kg (with fluids) / Convertible: 1845 kg (dry) / 2200 kg (; drive goes through 6-speed ZF 6HP19 automatic; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive/Front-engine, all-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 B3 sits alongside the Alpina B10, the Alpina B10 (E39), the Alpina B10 Bi-Turbo, the Alpina B12. The record names the Alpina B3 (E46) as its predecessor and the Alpina B3 (F30) / Alpina B4 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to class = Compact executive car (D). 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.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Alpina B3 costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.