One of the quotes from the CAR review went something along the lines of... 'the 4C costs as much as the Caymen GTS, which is ridiculous'. Fairly clear that they didn't see the 4C offering value for money as an overall proposition.
It's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison however, and evo is as guilty of that as anyone (for anyone who has seen the latest issue). I genuinely can't see many people cross-shopping the 4C and a Cayman simply because "Porsche people" and "Alfa people" have quite different priorities.
That, and it does come back to the construction methods. Even mass-produced carbonfibre is expensive, so anyone expecting the Alfa to be cheap simply because it's an Alfa/it has a four-cylinder engine/it's a bit basic inside is arguably missing the point.
Ultimately, the Alfa's problem isn't its relative expense - people throughout time have happily bought overpriced things - but the fact it's not as good a car as it should be.
Beyond the point that this is a £40k+++ car and shouldn't need fundamental fixes...
Again, I'd take the cost out of that equation. Yes, Alfa should have done things better initially (though positive early reports abroad do lead me to believe the 4C is a car significantly compromised by British roads) but to say a car shouldn't need fundamental fixes disregards peoples'
desire to change already-expensive products.
Witness the market for people making their floppy 1.7-ton muscle cars better on track. Or giving Toyota 86/Subaru BRZs more power. Or indeed Porsche owners doing anything and everything to their cars - I'd hazard that Porsche owners probably alter the base product more than owners of any other performance car.
Perhaps not fundamentally, in that a 911 or a Cayman is a pretty good road car to start with, but anyone who already wants a 4C will either drive it and not discover the issues that car mags have found (or discover them and not mind anyway - journos are a fickle bunch!), or decide they want to improve things.
Keeping it within Alfa, I get the impression that the first thing anyone who owns a 156 GTA does is immediately fits a Q2 diff and better suspension. Should Alfa have fitted these things from the start? Probably. Does their fitment show that owners are happy to work around a car's issues if they love the car? Definitely. And it turns the GTA into a cracking car too, from what I've read.
The key challenge with aftermarket improvements will be the cost - it's such a small volume car that pretty much everything would need to be custom made... I'd be very nervous about the amount of testing any aftermarket upgrades had given the number of cars out there... did they get the spring rates and travel right? did they get the bound/rebound rate ranges right?
I've never had a £40k car budget so can't comment with any authority, but spending a couple of grand on some custom coilovers when you've spent twenty times that on the car itself (and probably loaded it up with a few grand's worth of extra options - people even do that on superminis, because finance) probably isn't that big a deal.
