The 2016 BMW B6 Alpina Is a Game Changer for the Tourer Class - Bloomberg
More Than M6 As it happened, I was blissfully engulfed in a 2016 BMW B6 Alpina Gran Coupe. Here is what it is not: an M6. While BMW’s M line focuses on developing aggressive personalities in its performance cars, Alpina, a separate company that started tuning BMW cars back in the 1970s, cultivates a rather more elegant demeanor for its... The aura is similarly evident in the B7—the other Alpina developed stateside and based on the 7—as in the B6 I drove around Los Angeles and Carmel this week. Don’t drive this vehicle if you think you want a BMW M6. You’ll never make it to the M6. the Alpina will stop your search on the spot. Enter the Matrix The Alpina B6 Gran Coupe I drove has a 600-horsepower, twin-turbo V8 engine. It has an intelligent all-wheel drive (i. e. , it reads and responds to the road in real time) on an eight-speed automatic transmission that’ll pull to 60 miles per hour in 3. 6 seconds. (The M6, by the way, has only rear-wheel drive and a seven-speed, dual-clutch automatic or a six-speed manual. It also gets 560hp, 20 more than the Alpina, but has just 502 lb-ft of torque, far less than the B6. You would know the difference in an instant, if somehow you could drive them both blindfolded. Source: www.bloomberg.com
