Built between 1970 and 1977, the Montreal is everything the modern car industry is too scared to be.
The Expo
The Alfa Romeo Montreal began as a show car at the 1967 World Exposition in Montreal — which is how it got its name. Designed by Marcello Gandini at Bertone, it was never supposed to be a production car. It was supposed to be beautiful and impractical and leave people slightly unsettled. It succeeded on all counts.
Production began in 1970. Only 3,917 were ever built before Alfa pulled the plug in 1977. Every single one matters. The fact that it existed at all is something.
The Design
Look at a Montreal long enough and you begin to understand that most car design since has been a slow retreat from this point. The slatted headlamp covers. The body that looks simultaneously stretched and compressed. The roofline that seems genuinely aggressive, as though the car is irritated at being parked. The details that have no business being as good as they are on a car from 1970.
Gandini in the late 1960s was doing things nobody else was doing. The Montreal is evidence. So is the Lamborghini Miura. So is the Countach. One person, one decade, three cars that still define what a car is allowed to look like.
The Verdict
The Montreal is worth knowing about not because it was commercially successful — it wasn't — but because it represents a particular kind of ambition that the industry has mostly abandoned. The ambition to make something that looks the way a racing engine sounds. Something that makes people stop walking. If Alfa had kept making cars like this, they'd be a different company. Maybe a better one. There's a lesson in there, somewhere, for everyone.