Alfa Romeo 166: The Most Miserable Car Ever Built

In 2009, Glass’s Guide examined more than six thousand three-year-old cars in Britain to find which had lost their owners the most money.Second, third and fourth place were all Rovers—a brand that no longer existed.But the worst depreciating car wasn’t a Rover.It was the Alfa Romeo 166.An Italian executive saloon with double-wishbone suspension, one of the greatest V6 engines ever put into a road car, and technology that would eventually transform the diesel engine forever.After just three years, it was worth 14.4 per cent of its original price.The remarkable thing is that the Alfa Romeo 166 wasn’t really a bad car.In many ways, it was an extraordinary one.It was simply built by a company that repeatedly made exactly the wrong decision at exactly the wrong moment.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━📚 ORDER MY NEW BOOK "History Written by Losers" — out now! The true story of global power has been whitewashed by the victors and the fixers. This book tells the side of history they tried to bury. 👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🏁 IN THIS EPISODEIn this video, we uncover the extraordinary story of the Alfa Romeo 166: a beautifully engineered Italian flagship that arrived late, launched with the wrong face, pioneered technology its rivals would profit from, and became one of the fastest-depreciating cars ever sold in Britain.What’s inside:The Alfa That Had to Replace the 164:How Alfa Romeo began developing its new flagship as early as 1990, initially planning to simply reskin the existing 164 before Fiat management realised the resulting car would already be obsolete by the time it reached showrooms.Turning a Lancia Into an Alfa:How Alfa abandoned Project 934 and started again using the Lancia Kappa’s Type E platform—then threw away much of its suspension and engineered something considerably more sophisticated underneath.The Diesel Technology Fiat Gave Away:How Fiat developed common-rail diesel injection, created the system that would revolutionise modern diesel engines, then sold the patents to Bosch because it lacked the money to industrialise it.The First Common-Rail Passenger Car:How the Alfa Romeo 156 JTD became the first production passenger car in the world sold with common-rail diesel injection—and how the same technology would become crucial to the 166.The Busso V6:The story of Giuseppe Busso’s legendary aluminium V6, its chromed intake runners and the 2.5-litre, 3.0-litre and extraordinarily strange 2.0-litre turbocharged versions offered in the 166.The Two-Litre V6 Turbo:Why Italian tax laws encouraged Alfa Romeo to shrink its famous V6 below two litres, bolt on a Garrett turbocharger and produce 205 horsepower from an engine designed almost entirely for its domestic market.The 166’s Forgotten Four-Cylinder:Why the entry-level Twin Spark—with variable valve timing, a variable-length inlet manifold and two spark plugs per cylinder—was far more interesting than its position at the bottom of the range suggested.The Final Busso 3.2:How the facelift brought the 166 its ultimate engine—a 3.2-litre, 240-horsepower Busso V6 paired exclusively with a six-speed manual gearbox.The Car Worth 14.4 Per Cent:How catastrophic depreciation, weak dealers, expensive cambelt servicing and reliability concerns reduced a £30,000 executive saloon to a fraction of its original value.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━🔗 LINKS & SUPPORT📚 The book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH📺 Documentary channel: https://youtube.com/@thatjasonhassett🔔 Subscribe for weekly post-mortems on the cars, companies and engineering decisions that shaped modern motoring.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━#AlfaRomeo #AlfaRomeo166 #BussoV6 #GiuseppeBusso #Alfa166 #ItalianCars #CarHistory #AutomotiveHistory #CarNerd #Engineering #ClassicCars #TheCarNerd