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If you’re cross-shopping the Alfa-Romeo 4C Spider ($63,900) with the Porsche Boxster S convertible — a car that sells for about the same price but secures a bit more room and gobs of tech with names like “torque vectoring” along with the built-in swagger of the Porsche brand — or, say, the Chevrolet V8 Corvette — a car where you can throw down about 10 grand less and drive off in a similarly open-air borderline track car that’s nothing less than the automotive equivalent of a big swinging dick — then you might as well just pull the trigger there, because the Alfa 4C Spider is, well, a different kind of car.
This tiny, carbon-fiber-rich sports car with a targa roof is both a little bit better, and a little bit worse than its so-called competition, but it’s also something beyond. It’s a Montblanc to the Corvette’s Bic; a Sennheiser to the Boxster’s Beats. In a way, neither of those other cars merits being spoken in the same breath as the Alfa. They’re basic; the Alfa’s anything but.
Start with the lines. There’s something so unbelievably Italian about the car’s design — not just uniquely Alfa. It’s full-bore sexy and curvy in a way that its Italian compadres Lamborghini and Ferrari just aren’t. They’re staid compared the Alfa’s lewd visual behavior. Check out the steeply arced character lines that sweep up toward the scoops just behind the doors (built to channel air toward the mid-mounted engine), or the ridges on the front hood that direct the eye down below to the air grill and the logo. They’re like the string-thin straps on a bikini bottom. The targa version, of course, is that bikini with a missing top. Can the Boxster pull off that caliber of visual pornography? Don’t make me laugh.
It’s full-bore sexy and curvy in a way that its Italian compadres Lamborghini and Ferrari just aren’t.
You have to have confidence to inhabit a look like this, and in the 4C Spider that confidence comes from a petite, lightweight, ready-for-anything frame. There’s not an ounce of body fat on this car, and the bone and sinew that is there is spare and lean (which gives it another edge over its competition). The monocoque is full-carbon fiber, essentially a super-stiff, super-light tub for the seats. You can see the carbon fiber from the seats — the designers saw no need to mask those details — and feel it in the turns. The car, which weighs only 2,450 pounds, stays flat as a pancake no matter how hard you’re slinging it around. That stiffness also allowed Alfa’s engineers to lop the top off without having to bolster the car’s structural integrity via extra bracing, which also typically contributes significant weight to convertible conversions. The 4C Spider is only 22 pounds heavier than the coupe version.
Under the Hood
