Alfa Giulia Veloce long-term test: all aboard Dad's taxi!
Published: 18 October 2021
► The affordable sporting Giulia
► CAR lives with Alfa's saloon
► This one's a green Veloce
Locked and loaded
The Giulia’s boot matches a 3-series saloon’s at 480 litres, and with a bag under the front passenger’s legs and another between the kids, we fit in our luggage with visibility intact, although the BMW’s rear legroom is better. Noticeable improvement in ride quality with the car fully loaded. Just 257 miles and a predicted 4hrs and 45mins to go.
Queasy rider
Nice trip cross-country via Queniborough to hook up with the motorway network. Youngest gets easily car sick, just as I did. I massage the controls, making time on the straights, nursing it through the corners, but the sections with more flow reinforce just how sweetly the Giulia handles and steers. Windows open, bag at the ready…
Tried it, didn’t like it
Dynamic mode peps up the energy, but it’s giddy and shunty, so I typically leave it in Normal. With the kids onboard and a motorway schlep, I try A for, erm, Aconomy. It basically dials all the response out of the top of the throttle, so you just press it harder and don’t enjoy driving the car as much.
Hurry up and wait
We stop for a quick and early lunch at services before Bristol, pre-empting huge queues. But this drops us behind the rest of the UK racing to the West Country, and we lose over an hour in stop-start traffic around Bristol. Never seen so many cars on the hard shoulder for toilet stops.
Drive to arrive
We’ve made it! Dusty road to old farmhouse where our host has a nice line in old signage. Computer says we’ve averaged just over 30mpg and still have half a tank of fuel. Not bad considering the passengers and loaded boot.
Ho Ho Holiday!
Holiday really begins at Westward Ho! beach, I think the UK’s only beach with an exclamation mark! We expected huge queues, but it’s easy to drive onto the toll road to the car park. Man at the gate asks for his fiver. ‘Nice colour,’ he adds of the dust-streaked Visconti Green. He should have seen it 260-odd miles ago.
By Ben Barry
Logbook: Alfa Romeo Giulia Veloce
Price £40,210 (£41,606 as tested)
Performance 1995cc turbocharged four-cylinder, 276bhp, 5.7sec 0-62mph, 149mph
Efficiency 32.8mpg (official), 29.1mpg (tested), 195g/km CO2
Energy cost 20.5p per mile
Miles this month 1452
Total miles 5377
Month 4 living with an Alfa Giulia Veloce: every hero has a flaw
These reports have been very positive, so here’s a negatives special for this month only. Really it’s small if irritating stuff, like an electric handbrake that doesn’t auto release when I accelerate – sometimes I can trick it with a light tap on the accelerator, but mostly not, which makes it worse.
The doors lock and unlock with a loud beep like an alarm, and there’s a high-pitched frequency for a few minutes when you lock it, which on the plus side briefly prevents our cats from using the garden as a toilet. The throttle can feel lumpy, especially in Dynamic, almost like there’s too much turbo pressure as you ease in and out of it – this reminds me of the very earliest McLaren 12Cs, but I also noticed something similar on the Giulia QF.
Finally, the ride – super-supple on the 18s and adaptive dampers I first tried, often very poor on the 19s that are now compulsory and the passive dampers fitted to my car. This is the biggest deal-breaker, but thankfully adaptive dampers remain optional. Fitted with those, I’d still happily own a Giulia. And to end on a positive, I bust through the official quoted mpg with a 34.6mpg this month.
By Ben Barry
Logbook: Alfa Romeo Giulia Veloce
Price £40,210 (£41,606 as tested)
Performance 1995cc turbocharged four-cylinder, 276bhp, 5.7sec 0-62mph, 149mph
Efficiency 32.8mpg (official), 34.6mpg (tested), 195g/km CO2
Energy cost 16.6p per mile
Miles this month 1135
Total miles 3925
Month 3 living with an Alfa Giulia Veloce: better, but not £114k better
I took the chance to compare the most affordable sporting Giulia (our £41,606 Veloce) with the most expensive sporting Giulia, the £156,000 GTAm.
The Veloce delivers a fair chunk of the driving experience, particularly its quick-witted steering, well-balanced chassis and little pops for gearshifts. Of course it can’t match the GTAm’s excitement, but more surprising is that it doesn’t ride as nicely – a reminder that the Veloce really needs the optional adaptive dampers not fitted to our example.
Meanwhile, a long trip helped improve fuel economy by around 4mpg to almost 30.6mpg – close to the 32.8mpg official figure.
By Ben Barry
Logbook: Alfa Romeo Giulia Veloce
Price £40,210 (£41,606 as tested)
Performance 1995cc turbocharged four-cylinder, 276bhp, 5.7sec 0-62mph, 149mph
Efficiency 32.8mpg (official), 30.6mpg (tested), 195g/km CO2
Energy cost 18.4p per mile
Miles this month 551
Total miles 2790
Month 2 living with an Alfa Giulia Veloce: dreaming of Maranello
You might remember comparisons drawn between the Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio and Ferrari 488 GTB. Sounds fanciful, doesn’t it, but not only is there truth in that, it’s something that also extends to the more humble Veloce.
So how does a four-cylinder front-engined saloon feel a bit like a mid-engined turbocharged V8 supercar? Some of it’s sleight of hand in the visuals – suggestive stuff like the start button on the steering wheel, and long paddles fixed to the steering column rather than turning with the wheel.
But there’s substance too: like the Ferrari, the Alfa’s steering is unusually rapid off-centre and strikingly light. The engine has a juicy swell of torque in the mid-range (okay, all turbo cars do, bear with), and even the gearchanges have a similar digital pop. Factor in a sharp front end with adjustable handling (though, argh, you can’t turn the ESP off) and while the 488 and now the F8 Tributo of course exist in another realm of dynamics and performance entirely, the Giulia does a good job of translating their delicacy and excitement given they’re fundamentally not similar at all.
One crucial element is missing from my test car: the 488’s ride quality, because its 19-inch alloys and fixed-rate dampers can be disappointingly lumpy, sometimes even on stretches of motorway. The last Veloce I drove had 18-inch alloys with adaptive dampers, and its supple, sophisticated ride had echoes of Ferrari.
The Veloce now gets 19-inch alloys as standard, but you have to invest £1950 in the Performance Pack A (if there’s a ‘B’ on the configurator I can’t find it) to have adaptive dampers, which also bundles in a limited-slip differential. Yes, it is a bit odd to offer an LSD in a car that electronically forbids drifting, but the long and short of it is you need to spec the adaptive dampers for the full Fezza saloon experience. Lumpy ride aside, though, CAR’s saloon-shaped 488 impersonator is still a riot to drive.
By Ben Barry
Logbook: Alfa Romeo Giulia Veloce
Price £40,210 (£41,610 as tested)
Performance 1995cc turbocharged four-cylinder, 276bhp, 5.7sec 0-62mph, 149mph
Efficiency 32.8mpg (official), 26.2mpg (tested), 195g/km CO2
Energy cost 21.3p per mile
Miles this month 833
Total miles 2239
Month 1 living with an Alfa Giulia Veloce: hello and welcome
If money is no object and practicality not your priority, I'd say take a look at the Giulia GTAm, Alfa's new £156k, 532bhp track-focused two-seater. Or perhaps the combination of £67,195, a 503bhp V6 and actual back seats is more you, in which case you might fancy the Giulia Quadrifoglio, basically a more sensible version of the same. But if you want a large helping of sporting flavour in a much more affordable package, this Giulia Veloce is right up your strada.
The Veloce won the driver's-choice gong in our BMW 3-series mega-test two years ago, though it was marked down on a couple of shortcomings, including interior quality and infotainment. So the Giulia was always good if imperfect, but now it's been refreshed with more polish. A stint on our long-term test fleet will let us assess the improvements (and just enjoy driving one again).
The latest rejig of the Giulia line-up raised the entry price by £715 and the top spec by £4k, but our Veloce has gone down slightly, with more equipment as standard. The line-up starts with Sprint at £35,710, the Veloce now at £46,210 and the Veloce Ti rounds it out at £46,210. That gets more kit and is more obviously visually differentiated by its carbon pack.
Nothing else in this segment looks so alluring – classically beautiful in a modern way, and unusually sporting for this end of the market. This hasn't changed. The fundamentals of the interior also remain the same. There are fabulous sports seats with plush wraparound bolsters and black ribbed leather that recalls classic Alfa Romeos, and a dashboard and steering wheel with echoes of Ferrari 488/F8 Tributo – things like the flow of the architecture, the start button on the wheel, and the long, slender paddleshifters fixed to the steering column.
So the good stuff remains, but the laggy old infotainment has been replaced. It now integrates superbly with the dashboard, and appears to be one long piece of glass that flows from the centre console right through to the instrument cluster, with classic analogue dials for rpm and mph placed on top. You control it with a new 8.8-inch touchscreen, or a rotary controller that borrows BMW iDrive logic – no bad thing.
There's also a new centre console – bigger cubbies, new wireless phone charger – but the real win is the gearshifter. It used to look like a child's plastic sword had been driven down into the transmission tunnel, but it's now wrapped in leather, which makes a huge difference to cabin quality.
The Veloce's 2.0-litre turbocharged petrol four produces 276bhp and 295lb ft, and still has an eight-speed auto as standard. Other markets get all-wheel drive, but it's purely rear-wheel drive over here, which given the relatively modest power and sporting bent seems a better fit. That keeps the car's weight reasonable too, at 1429kg, which always helps the handling and performance, and gives fuel efficiency a boost. Alfa quotes an entirely tolerable 32.8mpg and 195g/km, though our first month is a bit further from that than we'd like, in the mid-20s. Short lockdown trips and a couple of squirts won't have helped.
The Giulia's closest rivals are the XE and 3-series, but neither correlates exactly on both price and spec with a Veloce – the Jaguar R-Dynamic costs either £30,985 in 247bhp trim with RWD, or £36,035 with 296bhp but AWD. The BMW 330i M Sport offers 254bhp for £40,640.
So the price is quite punchy, but there's a reasonable level of standard equipment, including keyless entry, rear-view parking camera and sensors front and rear. You can crank up the price with a restrained options list (Driver Assistance Pack, stereo upgrade, leather dash, sunroof) but ours rises a comparatively modest £1400. That includes two upgrades that make a pretty car even more seductive: Visconti Green paint (£700) and yellow brake calipers (£450). There's also a £250 Climate Pack, which adds bonus features like a cooled glovebox and rear air vents, but also the not-climate-related rear USB port too.
Notable by its absence is the Performance Pack, which brings a limited-slip diff (not such a big deal given you can't turn the stability system off, oddly) and more importantly adaptive dampers – which were fitted to the car that performed so well in our 3-series group test. That car also wore 18-inch alloys with plumper sidewalls, and the combination meant it rode very well.
So, dynamically, this car is as different as possible to the last one I drove, and it'll be interesting to explore that in the months ahead.
Spec details of our new Alfa
Happy compromise
Veloce gets a 2.0-litre turbo four good for 276bhp, but also 32.8mpg officially. Eight-speed automatic and rear-wheel drive is the only UK spec, even if AWD is offered elsewhere. Four-piston brakes are standard, but adaptive dampers and 19s optional – our car gets only the latter.
The good stuff stays
Giulia has been on sale since 2016; updates focus on improving interior quality and infotainment rather than the right-first-time dynamics and design. Key benefit is the new 8.8-inch touchscreen – it has a much more user-friendly interface thanks to grouping functions under swipeable tiles, and it neatly integrates technology into a driver-focused cabin.
£1400 well spent
Not too many options to worry about, but the Performance Pack brings adaptive dampers and a limited-slip differential. There's also a 900W Harman Kardon audio system, plus an upgraded Driver Assistance Pack, which includes auto full beam and traffic-sign recognition. Our car also gains yellow calipers and Visconti Green paint, £1400 all in.
By Ben Barry
Logbook: Alfa Romeo Giulia Veloce
Price £40,210 (£41,610 as tested)
Performance 1995cc turbocharged four-cylinder, 276bhp, 5.7sec 0-62mph, 149mph
Efficiency 32.8mpg (official), 24.5mpg (tested), 195g/km CO2
Energy cost 22.4p per mile
Miles this month 506
Total miles 1406