The 510 horsepower sports sedan is meant to be a BMW M3 beater, but will it be good enough to save Alfa?

YOU’RE LOOKING AT the new Alfa Romeo Giulia, the first fruit of a 5 billion Euro plan to save the troubled Italian carmaker.

A unit of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Alfa Romeo is on the verge of disappearing. Global sales dipped below 60,000 units last year, well under the level a carmaker needs to be profitable, and down from 74,000 cars in 2013.

To put that into perspective, BMW Group’s global sales grew by 154,000 units last year alone.

If you find the name familiar, here’s where it’s from, a sporty saloon that had a production run from 1962 to 1978:

The all-new Giulia is a total reset for Alfa. It’s based on a new rear-wheel drive architecture (that can be adapted to all-wheel drive) and about the size of a BMW 3 Series. That’s no coincidence; the 3 Series is BMW’s best-selling car around the world, making it a natural target.

The car you see here is the range-topping Quadrofoglio version, which has a twin-turbo V6 with 510 horsepower, very likely the Ferrari-built engine that powers a number of Maserati models.

Alfa CEO Harald Wester (who also runs Maserati, another Fiat-Chrysler brand) says that the brand’s cars must offer the best power-to-weight ratio in their class, in order to make them fun to drive.

In the Giulia Quadrofoglio, it’s under 3kg-per-hp, which translates to a kerb weight of roughly 1.5 tonnes.

That’s light for the segment, and is the result extensive (and expensive) use of lightweight materials like carbon fibre (the roof, bonnet, propeller shaft and seat frames are made of the stuff) and aluminium (fenders, doors, engine, suspension).

It should accelerate to 100km/h in under four seconds, by our reckoning.

To match the performance, the Giulia’s chassis setup will give it fast steering and agile handling, according to Alfa.

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While Alfa Romeo has obviously tried hard with this one, the Giulia is only the first of eight new models that Wester wants the brand to launch by 2018.

Alfa is also planning a larger sedan (basically a BMW 5 Series fighter) that will borrow heavily from Maserati’s Ghibli, and is working on two new front-drive cars to replace the Giulietta. One will be a five-door hatchback (think VW Golf) and the other, probably a small sedan (think Jetta).

The tiny MiTo won’t be replaced, but there should be a sportscar at the top of the price ladder that also borrows from Maserati.

A new SUV to rival the BMW X5 seems likely, along with a smaller crossover to have a go at the BMW X4. Alfa has plenty of hardware to raid from Fiat-Chrysler’s Jeep brand.

Five engines are being planned to power the range: three petrols and two diesels.

To pull this all off, CEO Wester has created an engineering “skunkworks” led by two senior Ferrari men.

They’ve been allowed to handpick their team, both from within Fiat-Chrysler and outside, and started off with a headcount of roughly 200. That should expand to 600 by the end of the year. Wester has given them tight deadlines and says they have to work in an environment of “intense cohabitation”, but has also promised that the parent company won’t interfere with their operations.

Their ultimate goal can be expressed in numerical terms: lift Alfa’s total sales to 400,000 cars by the end of 2018.

If it all sounds promising, a note of caution seems apt here: earlier turnaround plans for Alfa predicted that the brand would be selling half a million cars a year by now.

Still, Harald Wester does have a credible track record. He’s well on track with a target to grow Maserati’s annual output to 50,000 a year, a stunning climb from sales of only 6,200 in 2012.

Yet, formidable challenges lie ahead. €5 billion might sound like a lot, but it amounts to relatively little when spread out over eight cars.

Alfa Romeo has no presence in China, where the likes of BMW and Mercedes-Benz do a huge chunk of their business, and its dealer network elsewhere is relatively undeveloped.

Indeed, perhaps the real question is whether time will run out on Alfa Romeo before its revival gets properly underway. The Giulia goes on sale in Europe later this year, but the three-year wait for the other new models is a long one. Here in Singapore, Alfa Romeo sells two cars a month. Even a relatively small dealership needs to sell around 10 times as many cars to stay above water.