Automatic Berlinas, and three-liter coupes, etcetera

[JHertzman@domain.elided]

Gary Stark mentions to Graham Hilder that there were some automatic Berlinas
assembled in South Africa, and a number of these have found homes in Oz, and 
puts an interrogatory ".. John H.  ????" at the end.

The only road test I have seen of an automatic Berlina was in Australia. They 
were certainly built in very small numbers- 252 1750s and 187 2000s, per 
Fusi- a bit less than three tenths of one percent of the Berlinas built. I 
assumed that (wherever they were built) they would have to have represented a 
testing of the market at the initiative of Arese, because of the number of 
small problems of casings, floor-pan clearance, selector hardware, final 
drive ratio, speedometer drive etcetera which would have made it improbable 
as a local whim. But that is only guessing.

Keith Goring, of Alfas Unlimited in Connecticut, parted-out an automatic 
Alfetta Sport Sedan which was apparently a prototype or at least 
pre-production example, judging from the amount of fabrication and fiddling 
involved. That sort of development work would not be undertaken lightly.

In a prior post Howard Jacobs wrote that the three-liter GTV6 was locally 
developed, and that he believed the turbocharged Alfetta was also locally 
developed, and that in the seventies "Alfettas and Giulietta's were  made for 
Great Britain . SA is right hand drive so it made sense to make a limited run 
at Brits. I remember production runs totaling over 8000 cars per year". I 
would wonder about all that. Against the over 8,000 cars a year assembled in 
South Africa the UK Alfa sales were 11,000 in 1975, 15,000 in 1978, 16,000 in 
1979. Fusi's numbers stop in the early seventies, but Alfa was certainly 
building RHD cars which were not CKD; for the 1750 GT Veloce there were 4,738 
rhd cars plus another 821 CKD split between Africa, Malta, Paraguay, Kuala 
Lumpur, Bankok and the rest. I would at least register an ambivalent 
"perhaps", as I would with the local initiative component in the turbos and 
three-liters. Forging a small batch of long-stroke cranks and casting 
bigger-bore blocks seems more likely an Arese initiative, but I do not have 
facts. 

Cordially,

John H.

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