ZCanadian

Saw this in the June 2017 MotorTrend at a dealership today. Not sure if the article was posted already - I think that the video was.

MotorTrend $399 Lease Deal Challenge.

That's the regular Giulia.

Spoiler Alert: The Alfa wins.

Also in the same magazine is a review/comparison of the Giulia Quadrifoglio against other performance sedan competitors. Basically, they were blown away with it.

MotorTrend Sports Sedan Comparison

Spoiler alert: The Alfa wins. Again.

Quote:
To judge a brand-new car’s expected reliability by the reputation of a car produced 30 years ago is absurd, but bad reputations are tough to shake, especially one as well earned as Alfa Romeo’s. Alas every conversation we had about the Giulia Quadrifoglio included concerns of impending catastrophic breakdown. To our surprise, the Alfa showed no sign of weakness during this long, abusive test. Instead, it charmed us all and crippled the competition, claiming an easy victory.

Why so easy? The sheer breadth of its capabilities. The Giulia is a jack-of-all-trades and master of most. Whereas most cars do one thing well at the expense of everything else, the Giulia simply does everything well. For example, it rides so smoothly, is so quiet inside, and cruises down the highway with such relaxed confidence that we GPS-verified its speedometer to ensure it wasn’t optimistic by 15 mph.

But then, with the mode selector in Race mode, the Alfa forgets about luxury, transforming into a violent sports sedan with a bad boy attitude none of its three competitors can come close to matching. On track, the Alfa demonstrates athleticism nearing the Cadillac’s but manages an even quicker lap time. The Giulia’s torque-vectoring rear differential helps put every one of its 505 horsepower to good use. There’s no accidental tire smoke here. In fact, the Giulia doesn’t like to do powerslides; it just wants to be fast.

Speaking of fast, the Alfa’s steering uses an obscenely quick ratio, 11.8:1 with just 2.3 turns from lock to lock. The electrically assisted steering is as light as a Ferrari’s and almost as precise, giving its driver the impression that the Giulia is weightless. Aided by hyperaggressive 60-tread-wear Pirelli P Zero Corsa tires, cornering grip is yuge, which left us puzzled when the Alfa tied the BMW for the least skidpad grip of the group.

Ignore that number. In fact, ignore all numbers because whether driving in a straight line, in corners, or on a racetrack, the Alfa is incredible. Over broken, twisty tarmac, this sedan’s family lineage becomes clear. Ferrari’s former chief engineer Roberto Fedeli is now Alfa Romeo’s chief technical officer, and the Quadrifoglio’s dynamics bear his stamp. This five-seater possesses the same preternatural ability as the best recent Ferraris to follow your wishes no matter how absurd the request. It does things that seem impossible, feeling like it could change direction while airborne. It shrugs off jumps, bumps, surface changes, and camber swaps as if the laws of physics were rewritten especially for it. You know there must be electronic trickery happening, yet you feel none of it. And better, all of this capability is met with equal parts fun, and that’s something so often missing in very fast cars. The Giulia Quadrifoglio is the closest thing to a Ferrari sedan you can buy.

We haven’t even spoken of the engine yet. The 505-hp 2.9-liter V-6 is a masterpiece. It’s not just good for a V-6, like every other engine of this configuration, but genuinely, surprisingly, odds-defyingly epic. Then again, it should be, since it’s a Ferrari California T V-8 with the front two cylinders lopped off. The short-stroke, nonbalance-shafted six will rev 900 rpm past its 6,500-rpm tachometer redline, never making any of the cringeworthy mechanical noises that plague all other V-6s. This is, perhaps, the best V-6 since the famed Alfa Romeo “Busso” engine that powered the Giulia’s predecessors three decades ago.

By any normal standards, the powerplant suffers from major turbo lag. No surprise, because it delivers similar power to the twin-turbocharged Mercedes V-8 using just three-quarters the pistons and displacement. However, the Giulia knows that turbo response quickens with engine speed, so it plays a few tricks to keep its engine on the boil. First and most fabulous, the 505-hp Quadrifoglio’s first six gears are shorter than those in a 155-hp Mazda Miata. Read that sentence again, please.

The second trick is keeping the exhaust from the two banks of cylinders mostly separate, resulting in a V-6 that sounds more like two angry three-cylinder engines. The pitch doesn’t change much with engine speed, so what sounds to your ears like 3,000 rpm is more like 5,000 on the tach. The Quadrifoglio’s engine never screams like an Italian soprano, but all those relaxed revs mean you’ll never be yelling about its turbo lag.

In stop-and-go traffic, of course, you can catch the engine asleep. It’s here that you also notice the Giulia’s biggest flaw—it is impossible to come to a smooth, slow stop. To blame are two things: one, a by-wire braking system that’s not always linear in its response and two, a clutch that decouples the transmission right as the car is about to come to a full stop. Fiat-Chrysler says the by-wire system allows the brakes to react more quickly to inputs and cycle more quickly under ABS, but the Quadrifoglio’s braking distances were midpack despite its grippy tires. So we see no benefit from using the by-wire system.

What we do see is added complexity on an Italian car. That makes us nervous. We happily awarded the Giulia first place, experiencing no reliability issues at all with the two test cars we abused. Then, a few weeks later, a different Giulia died in traffic, leaving one of our senior staffers blocking the road until the flatbed arrived. And then yet another test car showed off its Italian heritage by stalling randomly during a photo shoot.

Apparently this Giulia might live up to Alfa’s love-it-but-don’t-trust-it reputation after all. Or it could just be early-build teething problems from an all-new platform. We still think it’s the best compact sport sedan you can buy, even if it winds up breaking your heart. Better to have loved and been towed home than to have never loved at all.

SINISTER will love that last bit. But keep in mind, this was also a pre-production car.