I am an alfista. The word is Italian for someone devoted to the cars produced by Alfa Romeo. Together with the thousands of others who share that devotion, I am one of the alfisti. Nobody chooses to join the ranks of the alfisti on the numbers alone. We love the brand for reasons that have little to do with logic, and we choose these beautiful, difficult, idiosyncratic cars because of how they make us feel.

October was an exciting month to be an alfista. Alfa Romeo brought a new concept car to the Paris Motor Show, a vehicle it named Cuorerosso—red heart. In fact, it was a good month for car enthusiasts of every stripe. In the same week that Alfa showed the Cuorerosso in Paris, Porsche introduced its Mission S concept in New York, and Tesla finally unveiled the Roadster it had been promising for years. These three cars, each unique in their own way, share something important in common: each was built for a world in which the act of driving can be, and increasingly is, handed over to software.

All three cars are worth examining in their own right, as moments in the history of the automobile and in the history of business. But what makes them worth looking at together is that each gives a different answer to the same question—what is a car for once a machine can drive it? That question is the automotive version of one that leaders in every industry are facing right now.

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