Isn’t it funny what people choose to care about? Apparently, there was uproar over the weekend (and let’s use ‘uproar’ in the loosest possible sense here) when the Italian government declared that the use of the name ‘Milano’ for Alfa’s incoming compact SUV ‘is banned by law’. Or at least that’s the view Italy’s industry minister, Adolfo Urso, took when he was alerted by union officials that the car would actually be produced in Tcyhy, Poland, rather than in Milan or indeed anywhere else in Italy.
Quite whether it is actually illegal (Alfa is apparently confident it isn’t) is now a moot point because rather than suffering ongoing controversy on the subject - especially in its crucial home market - Alfa has decided to change the car’s name to ‘Alfa Romeo Junior’ in the ‘spirit of promoting mutual understanding.’ This despite the fact that the firm originally asked for the public’s help in choosing the name, and had selected Milano on the basis that it paid ‘tribute to the city where our history all began in 1910’.
Putting the best possible spin on it, Jean-Philippe Imparato, Alfa’s CEO, said: “We are perfectly aware that this moment will remain engraved in the history of the Brand. It's a great responsibility but at the same time it's an exciting moment. The choice of the name Alfa Romeo Junior is completely natural, as it is strongly linked to the history of the Brand and has been among our favourites and among the public's favourites since the beginning.”
He added: “We decided to change the name, even though we know that we are not required to do so, because we want to preserve the positive emotion that our products have always generated and avoid any type of controversy. The attention to our new sports compact that we’ve received the past few days is quite exciting as we had an unprecedented number of visits to the online configurator, causing the website to crash for a couple hours."
Now, 'Junior' has some currency of its own (indeed, it was on the previous shortlist) thanks to the GT 1300 Junior that was launched in 1966 and went on to sell 92,000 units, so Alfa hasn’t plucked it from nowhere. But we’ll go right ahead and say that it’s an inferior name to ‘Milano’. For one thing, it provides an opportunity for almost endless puns in English, for another it conjures up an ambiguous sense of inferiority - which is something else you want to avoid in car names. Even family-orientated ones.
But we feel a little for Alfa here. Aside from not properly considering the optics of the situation in an age that specialises in mock outrage, it seems to have done little wrong. Italians may continue to hold the brand close to their hearts, but Alfa is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Stellantis, a multi-national carmaker that has manufacturing facilities in 30 countries. Certainly within Europe, mass-produced cars are built where it makes commercial sense to do so, with often precious little regard given to romantic notions of lineage. The Land Rover Defender is built in Slovakia. Would we be aggrieved if it were called the Solihull? Probably not.
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