Has yet another multi-billion-dollar Alfa Romeo comeback already left the building?

European sales figures for the first half of 2019 sure seem to indicate that it has, even though Fiat Chrysler Automobiles insists it retains great plans for the brand.

The re-energised Italian premium sports company, with five models in its dealerships, has been outsold in Europe by its stablemate, Lancia, in the first half of this year, as pointed out by FCA specialist analyst Fiat Group World.

2019 has marked another dark time in Alfa’s modern history, despite having the upgraded, nine-year-old Giulietta, the Giulia sedan, the MiTo, the 4C and the Stelvio crossover at its sales disposal.

Alfa Romeo sales dropped an astonishing 42 per cent in Europe compared to the first half of 2018, ending the first six months of the year with 29,187 sales.

By contrast, Lancia sells just one car – the Ypsilon, which started life in 2011 and is based on the budget mini, the Fiat Panda.

It is also sold in just one country – Italy – after the once-legendary brand was withdrawn from the rest of Europe in 2017, yet it still managed to lift its sales by 29 perc ent this year to 34,691 cars.

Alfa has been pummelled in both business and private sales, with its business registrations dropping from 33,400 in H1 2018 to just 19,200 this year, while its private sales also fell by 40 per cent.

It was pole-axed in France (falling 61 per cent) and Germany (down 39 per cent), but its collapse in Italy (where it fell 47 percent to just 14,700 registrations) will cause it the most concern.

Of particular concern, the company so strongly rooted in the Italian psyche had just 5000 private registrations in the first half of the year in its homeland.

Given the multi-billion euro investment into the Giorgio stand-alone Alfa platform and the recent facelift to the Giulietta, the situation must be dire at the company’s headquarters.

Even the newest Alfa model, the Stelvio, saw its European sales drop by 18 per cent this year to just 13,800 registrations as it was overtaken by updates to rivals like the BMW X4.

It sold 9037 cars in the first half of the year in the US, according to the carsales base.com website, but that compared poorly to 12,265 the year before.

In Australia, the brand sold 448 cars in the first half of the year, down 31.8 per cent on 2018 and holding just 0.2 per cent of the Australian new car market.

Public support for the heavily marketed Giulia sedan has collapsed, with just 188 of them bought in the first half of the year, compared to 336 last year, with its share of the medium $60,000-plus segment slashed by a third.

It sold just 98 Giuliettas this year (down from 163 last year) and only three 4C sports cars.

Alfa is twinned with Maserati within the company and the Modena-based brand at least has plans to pull its produce line-up into the next decade with a range of plug-in hybrids, a Porsche Macan-testing crossover and an electrified sports car.