Alfa Romeo Tonale review: At last a crossover to set pulses racing
ALFA ROMEO is one of the greatest names in motoring history.
Pre-War it was a credible rival to Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Bugatti.
Before Enzo Ferrari built his own cars, he ran a team of Alfa Romeos.
In the Sixties it built a brilliant line of sports saloons and coupes, easily the equivalent of today’s BMW 3 Series and 4 Series.
As Jeremy Clarkson explained on Top Gear: “No one can call themselves a car enthusiast unless they’ve owned an Alfa Romeo.”
Today, Alfa once again has a Formula 1 team. It’s proving its global ambition by employing the first Chinese F1 driver, Guanyu Zhou.
On the road, the Giulia saloon and Stelvio big crossover are the best-looking and best-to-drive of their kinds.
Everyone loves Alfa Romeo and wants it to do well.
But hardly anyone does the thing that will make Alfa Romeo do well – buy one. Sales are on the floor.
Oddly, Alfa finds itself in a similar position to Jaguar. High awareness, low image.
Everyone knows the grand history, but there’s a blockage to buying one.
For Jaguar, it’s probably the assumption they’re driven only by crusty colonels on the way to the 19th hole. For Alfa, it’s memories of patchy dealerships and dodgy reliability.
Swoopy-looking
As Alfa’s CEO Jean-Philippe Imparato candidly told me: “Go back to the Seventies, our fathers’ and grandfathers’ cars. They said ‘I love Alfa but I have to buy two to make one’.”
So even though you might think Alfa’s place is making expensive fast cars, he says the first job is to make some profit by picking off the low-hanging fruit.
Especially compact and small ones, he says.
So here is a new £35k Alfa. Not a swoopy sports car for a hundred grand, but a crossover the size of an Audi Q3 or BMW X1.
It’s called the Tonale. Pronounced like finale. Not like toenail.
OK, so in general small crossovers aren’t the sexiest things in the multi-storey, but of its kind this one is quite swoopy-looking. Under the bonnet there’s a choice of mild-hybrid 1.6-litre, or an underwhelming diesel.
More intriguing is the top version, which has a petrol engine for the front wheels and electric drive to the back ones. Total power is 275bhp.
You can also plug it in and travel about 27 miles on that electric drive alone. Great for emissions and company-car tax.
Imparato has addressed the unreliability head-on by offering a five-year guarantee. To protect secondhand values, each car has its own non-fungible token, a sort of crypto certificate. This records the spec, the service records, mileage, even the number of times the battery is charged.
Half-pregnant
It should see an end to clocking, and make used buyers more confident.
Alfa says the Tonale is a new start. It isn’t. It’s more of a placeholder.
If it succeeds it’ll keep the brand alive until the next generation of fast, sexy-looking Alfa Romeos arrive, from 2025. They will, says Imparato, be true Alfas. But all electric. He promises these new electric cars will have the same performance, range and potential recharging speed as today’s petrol ones.
“Based on what we know now, after 2027 I’ll sell only battery-electric cars,” Imparato explains.
He says Alfa is too small to develop all-new petrol cars as well as electric. “You can’t be half-pregnant.”
Although oddly enough the petrol-electric Tonale shows that, temporarily at least, you can be.
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