Alfa Romeo Isn't Going to Meet Its 2017 Sales Targets - Blame China

Alfa Romeo is on track to sell between 130,000 and 140,000 vehicles around the globe in calendar year 2017, a far cry from the 170,000-unit performance Sergio Marchionne expected Alfa to put together.

U.S. sales remain predictably low by the standards of rival brands but are rising quickly now that the Stelvio SUV is in action. But on the other side of the Pacific, new rules that limit automobile manufacturers from forcing dealers to accept stock, Automotive News Europe reports, has sorely limited sales in China. Thus, rather than the 2,666 Alfa Romeo Stelvios shipped to China in July, only 227 landed in China in August.

The result? Alfa Romeo is cutting back production of the Stelvio and Giulia in Cassino, Italy.

Alfa Romeo was already decreasing Stelvio and Giulia production in September 2017 with production stops on Fridays. Now the vehicles-built-per-shift has been cut 12 percent to 265. This essentially ends, or at the very least suspends, Alfa Romeo’s goals of selling 170,000 vehicles annually. That 170,000-unit sales goal, of course, was actually the far more realistic goal after Marchionne said in 2014 that Alfa Romeo would sell 400,000 vehicles annually by 2018.

Key to that forecast, at least in the mind of Alfa Romeo executives, was the U.S. incursion. Sure, Alfa Romeo sold only 74,000 vehicles in 2013, but that was without any effort in the U.S. market and without the RWD-based lineup that would surely spur demand.

Sales in the United States have by no means been profoundly low, but the ramp-up of what is essentially a new-to-America brand (for most buyers) takes a long time. Naturally, the Alfa Romeo Giulia doesn’t sell remotely as well as the Mercedes-Benz C-Class, BMW 3 Series, or Audi A4. But Alfa Romeo is now averaging more than 900 U.S. sales per month, easily outselling the Jaguar XE over the last six months and nearly matching the pace of indirect domestic competition such as the Lincoln Continental and Cadillac CTS.

Yet with only 1,268 total sales in September, Alfa Romeo’s best month since arriving back in America, FCA’s middle Italian child hardly appears primed to produce the level of demand needed for the Cassino assembly plant to ignite a higher rate of production. China may be to blame for Alfa Romeo’s recent production downturn, but America’s luxury car buyers are hardly lending a helping hand.

[Images: Alfa Romeo]

Timothy Cain is a contributing analyst at The Truth About Cars and Autofocus.ca and the founder and former editor of GoodCarBadCar.net. Follow on Twitter @timcaincars and Instagram.