Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio review: inarguably beautiful, but there are issues
Muscular yet svelte, anyone who wants a classy European sedan should be buying a Giulia … if they can overlook a few issues.
This comes as a shock to me, as I’ve based my entire personal and professional career on believing the opposite, but it turns out that being beautiful isn’t enough.
One might imagine that Brad Pitt or Margot Robbie could get paid for just being so glimmeringly-gosh-wonderful to look at, but they actually have to pretend to be other people, and even pretend to scalp or shoot other people, to turn a buck.
As such, the fact that I almost never see an Alfa Romeo Giulia on the road, anywhere, should not come as a surprise, yet it still does. I genuinely believe that, once they’ve decided on the kind of vehicle they need, the final choice of which brand of car a consumer buys is most heavily influenced by their eyes, and the visual appeal of the product they’re going to look at – and be seen in – every day.
That being the case, anyone who wants (and can afford) a classy European sedan should be buying a Giulia, because it is so inarguably beautiful that people’s tongues tend to loll out of their faces when they see it.
It is muscular yet svelte, shapely and imposing, impressive and yet restrained – and parked next to anything out of Germany it proves, once again, the superiority of Italian design (as a Ferrari exec once said to me when I asked why its cars are so pretty: “It’s because we are Italian, we grow up surrounded by beauty, it is who we are”).
On the other hand, it is an Alfa Romeo. This means there are going to be some issues, and I encountered a few in the savagely sporty Quadrifoglio version I was driving, starting with the fact that it constantly felt like one of the windows was down.
Essentially there was so much wind noise next to my right ear that I felt the need to stab at the window buttons repeatedly to make sure they were properly sealed. The road noise wasn’t great either, but fortunately both of these things could be drowned out by mashing the accelerator and listening to the pleasant grumblings of the lovely and lively 2.9-litre twin-turbo V6.
A further curiosity comes from the “DNA” switch, which obviously changes the car’s mood, performance and how hard it drinks.
I could guess that D stands for Dynamic, as that setting made the ride firmer and the exhaust louder (there’s also a Race button, which makes the car far too furious for public roads), but N and A had me stumped – Nice and Awful? Nanna and Aggro?
It turns out they stand for “Natural” and “Advanced”, and even my extremely well calibrated and sensitive road tester’s buttocks and hands couldn’t tell the difference between the two. So that’s a D for me.
I was further confused by the gearbox, which I would have sworn was a particularly inept dual-clutch unit, but turns out to be the same excellent eight-speed ZF automatic found in lots of German cars. Sadly in this car it felt like I was going to stall every time we rolled up to the lights. I would stamp the brakes and tickle the throttle, trying to keep it alive and looking very much like a Learner, and then eventually the engine would just stop. I never could work out how to cancel the auto stop/start function, either, but I can tell you that swearing at it doesn’t help.
Some of these issues did cause me to wonder why anyone would take their chances on an Alfa Romeo, but then I would catch sight of it in my driveway and get all emotional. It’s almost as lovely inside (aside from the cheap feeling gear shifter, which would be so much better if it was attached to the manual version that some Europeans got), with lashings of carbon fibre everywhere, a sexy steering wheel with properly Ferrari-like giant shift paddles attached and very comfortable seats. I wish you could sit just a bit lower in the car, though.
With its classic front-engine, rear-wheel-drive set up, 375kW and 600Nm and the ability to growl from zero to 100km/h in just 3.9 seconds, it is also hugely entertaining and deeply involving to drive, with the steering a particular highlight. It’s also surprisingly roomy in the back, although the boot space of 480 litres would make an SUV owner laugh mockingly.
Despite being so obviously aggressive, the Quadrifoglio version also manages to pull off the neat trick of not being awful or annoying around town. You can just drive it like a normal sedan in its milder modes and suffer no inconvenience from a bone-rattling ride or an overly touchy throttle – and then when you get out of town at the weekend you can flick a switch and find yourself driving an entirely different and more exciting machine.
The Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio isn’t cheap, at $151,700, but then nothing beautiful is.
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Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio
Engine: 2.9-litre twin-turbo V6 (375kW/600Nm)
Fuel economy: 8.2 litres per 100km
Transmission: 8-speed automatic, rear-wheel drive
Price: $151,700
Rating: Four stars out of five
