Andreas Bovensiepen spent the late 1990s helping develop the BMW Z8. Now he’s building the car BMW no longer wants to build itself.
The Spider, Bovensiepen’s third model since the family split from the ALPINA brand BMW absorbed, is a 435 hp straight-six roadster limited to 99 hand-built units. Priced from €115,500 in Germany, with deliveries slated for early 2027, it drops into a segment that virtually every major manufacturer has abandoned. The timing is either perfectly stubborn or perfectly shrewd.
Under the hood sits BMW’s B58 3.0-liter twin-scroll turbo inline-six, tuned to 320 kW and 580 Nm. Bovensiepen didn’t chase those numbers by cranking boost. Instead, the team opened up the intake ducting, added a second ram-air channel, enlarged the intake silencer, and reworked the exhaust to cut back pressure.
The approach is old-school tuner philosophy dressed in modern engineering: breathe better, don’t just squeeze harder.
A ZF eight-speed automatic handles shifts in roughly a tenth of a second in Sport mode. The car weighs 1,585 kg, giving it a power-to-weight ratio of 3.6 kg per horsepower. Bovensiepen wants you to focus on that number, not the peak output figure.
A 1,000-watt electric cooling fan keeps the powertrain thermally stable during sustained hard driving. That’s a detail separating a car meant to be used from one built to impress on a spec sheet.
The chassis work is precise but restrained. Retuned dampers with higher compression rates at low speeds, longer auxiliary springs at the rear axle, and standard 20-inch forged wheels wearing Michelin Pilot Sport 4 S rubber in staggered fitment. Standard top speed is 260 km/h, while the optional Performance Package pushes that to 295 km/h by adding a milled aluminum rear differential cover with oversized cooling fins and an underbody V-brace.
Frank Stephenson, who also penned the 800 hp Bovensiepen 05 GT, designed the exterior. It follows classic front-engine sports car proportions: long hood, cabin shoved rearward, stubby overhangs. At 4,334 mm long and just 1,304 mm tall, it looks like what it is, a purpose-built two-seater with no pretense of practicality beyond a 281-liter boot.
Inside, the company’s in-house saddlery does the heavy lifting. Standard trim pairs Vernasca leather with Alcantara in Bovensiepen’s own pattern, while the steering wheel gets Lavalina leather, a barrel-dyed, full-grain cowhide. Buyers who want the full Lavalina interior treatment will pay €9,916 for it, choosing from sixteen shades with contrast or tone-in-tone stitching.
Bespoke requests go further: Alcantara-lined footwells, embroidered motifs, whatever the saddlery can execute. Each car carries a numbered plaque.
The color allocation is already locked. Forty cars in Sapphire Black, 25 in Sanremo Green, 20 in Skyscraper Grey, nine in Thundernight, and five in Frozen Grey II. You don’t get to pick freely, though custom colors are available through the manufactory.
A fully loaded Spider, with Lavalina leather, anthracite brake calipers, and the bespoke embossing package, climbs to nearly €130,000 before any custom paint enters the conversation. The optional brake upgrade brings 395 mm perforated front discs clamped by four-piston fixed calipers.
WLTP combined consumption lands at 8.8 liters per 100 km with CO2 at 199 g/km. Those numbers won’t win any green awards, but they place the Spider in Germany’s G emissions class, which means the tax hit is real.
What Bovensiepen has done is fill a gap with surgical precision. BMW killed its roadster ambitions. Porsche moved the Boxster to electric. Mazda’s MX-5 lives in a different price universe.
The Spider sits alone in a space that used to be crowded, built by a family that knows BMW mechanicals better than almost anyone outside Munich. Orders are open now, and 99 is not a large number.
Share this Story