Long-term test: Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio

There’s little logical sense to the Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio. Day-to-day, its high fuel use and lumpy low-speed driving maers are grating and wasteful. But on the right road almost nothing with an SUV body is better to drive.

I’m now a few months into Quadrifoglio life, and I have to admit the guilt meter is twitching. My central London base means I rarely use a car for errands or that sort of thing day-to-day, but the reality of driving a high-performance petrol-powered SUV in and out of the city still means there’s a lot of time spent in traffic idling away. Alfa has fitted a stop-start system, but it seems to be about as active as an Italian post office in mid-August. 

It’s not just emissions guilt, either, but it has resulted in some fairly appalling fuel economy returns in the last few months, with the Stelvio falling to just 21.7mpg. The last time I drove a car with figures like that, it had a Lamborghini badge on it. 

It’s not particularly happy at these speeds, either. The brakes have an odd propensity to hold a little after you press the throttle pedal, releasing the car with a jolt, which can’t possibly be helping economy. Frankly, for the sort of driving that I do most of the time, having such an engine just doesn’t make sense, because it consumes premium unleaded – which is particularly expensive right now, as I’m sure you have noticed – at an alarming rate.

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But when you’re on the right road and in the right mood, the Stelvio Quadrifoglio is almost impossible not to fall for. And this is down to the quality of engineering that went into the model, and its Giulia cousin, some years back. It’s a story I love hearing, but these cars were in effect created in the night by a crack team of engineers and designers from deep inside Alfa Romeo, rather than as part of a group project with input from other brands. And indisputably, they’re all the better for it.

In being off-book, the team had more freedom to execute exactly the model it wanted, and by extension the dynamically capable car Alfa Romeo needed at the time. This unerring focus is obvious in almost every aspect of the driving experience, and while there are plenty of individual elements that could have been developed further, each was the result of passion, not endless compromise. 

Drive the Quadrifoglio down a challenging, bumpy back road and there’s grip, power and superb body control. But the Stelvio isn’t about numbers; instead, it’s the feel that’s important. The SUV stance sits you a little higher than would be considered ideal, but the chassis is wonderfully balanced, so you turn into bends with supreme confidence and accelerate out as if this was a focused sports car.

This level of dynamic alacrity doesn’t come from a committee of accountants and product plaers following endless rounds of meetings, but passionate engineers with real skin in the game. These are people who are driven by a love for cars and the badges they wear, which is certainly the case with the Stelvio Quadrifoglio. When we speak about legacy in the automotive world, it’s about the knowledge and history that underpin it – and this car is a representation of what is great about Alfa Romeo. 

Could a Tesla Model Y Performance outperform the Stelvio by every on-paper performance metric? Without doubt. Is it more efficient, clever, coected, practical than the Quadrifoglio? Yep, afraid so. Do I yearn to own a Tesla? Not a chance. 

This sentiment was put into specific context recently, because the past month has delivered some wonderful driving experiences in the Stelvio. Most recently, it acted as a photography car and support vehicle for a photoshoot that included the rare and rather ridiculous-looking Giulia Quadrifoglio Luna Rossa, proving once again that it can elevate mundane tasks into something special and that passion needn’t come at the expense of practicality. 

Granted, this car makes absolutely no logical sense, and in many ways life with the Quadrifoglio is sometimes a bit of a pain. But I challenge anyone to try to take the Alfa Romeo away from me prematurely, because I simply won’t allow that to happen.

A wedding gave the Stelvio the chance to show off its practical side, and it handled the task with ease

In an unusual twist of fate for long-term test cars in my possession, our resplendent green Stelvio was pressed into action as a versatile SUV this month. It’s hardly been suffering the trials of child-ferrying or camping holidays, though. Shifting a bootful of flowers, decorations and some outdoor chairs for a wedding (not mine) is about as hardcore as my practicality needs get. 

And the car did a brilliant job. The Stelvio is something of a middle-ranker in terms of size, so while it’s not quite as commodious as the BMW iX3 we’ve recently welcomed onto the fleet, it was plenty for my requirements. The rear seats fold nearly flat, although this is the first car I’ve come across to feature a lever for the folding mechanism mounted on the seat base by the rear footwell. In any case, I’ve been impressed with how easy it is to switch into van mode, without the Alfa feeling too big or cumbersome in the city.

Hot SUV joins our fleet as we explore the importance of legacy in a fast-changing car world

You could be forgiven for asking why we are ruing an ostensibly old Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio as a new fleet car. It’s been on sale for nearly eight years, and while there were some recent updates – such as more power, improved tech, and better headlights – there is a much broader reason for featuring this car: to find out how important legacy is in our new fast-food world of cars. 

The last three long-term test cars I’ve run have been from ‘new-age’ manufacturers: Tesla, Polestar and most recently BYD. And the experience got me wondering about the part that history plays in choosing a new car. 

To answer this we’ve turned to Alfa Romeo, a brand whose story stretches back 115 years (it turns 116 on 24 June). And for a bit of context, China was still ‘Imperial China’ when Alfa was incorporated in Turin.

While the form of this ‘legacy’ car – a high-performance SUV – is on the contemporary side, it’s also the purest Alfa Romeo product in the brand’s current line-up. The chassis, engine, interior, tech interfaces and more, were all designed and developed in-house by a small skunkworks team, even though Alfa is part of a much larger conglomerate.  

The Stelvio might be a relatively old design, but its technical spec is still compelling. It has been developed on a lightweight saloon-car platform with the engine mounted mostly behind the front axle for improved weight distribution. That unit is a 513bhp 2.9-litre twin-turbo V6 petrol engine that’s coected to an eight-speed automatic transmission sending that power to all four wheels, although with an obvious rear-drive bias. 

It’s also a very light car for its type, at 1,830kg. For comparison, a Mercedes-AMG GLC 53 is more than 300kg heavier, and if you consider electric rivals, the Porsche Macan Turbo weighs almost 600kg more. 

The cabin is often where cars can feel their age, and that is certainly true here. While I love the steering wheel and the paddles behind it, the simplicity of the air-con controls and the drive-mode switch, the main digital interface – which felt a little behind the curve in 2018 – is pretty poor. Its resolution is low, it’s slow to react and the rear camera view looks like someone’s smeared Vaseline on the lens. At least the system includes Apple CarPlay, but it’s only able to be coected via a wire.

A nice contrast to this is the high-res screen behind the wheel that replaces the physical dials. It was introduced in 2024, and although it’s not particularly configurable, its vintage instrument set looks great. You can even set up three extra ‘performance dials’ to re-create the iconic five-dial layout that defined Alfa Romeo cabins for decades. Legacy, it seems, is already seeping its way into the experience. 

This isn’t a cheap car, though. Its basic price is £96,090, and although our car only has three options, it still costs £102,040. But mid-sizeSUVs in their high-performance form cost that much these days. A Macan Turbo Electric costs from £97,565, for example. There’s another question to consider, too. I live in London and for almost five years, I’ve been almost exclusively driving EVs day-to-day. So is switching back to a petrol car a good idea? 

Will I relish not needing to search out public charging points? Will sitting in traffic in a gas- guzzling high-performance SUV get the guilt-meter twitching? And what role does legacy really play? I’ve got six months to find out.

*Insurance quote from AA (0800 107 0680) for a 42-year-old in Banbury, Oxon, with three points.

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News editor at Auto Express, Jordan joined the team after six years at evo magazine where he specialised in news and reviews of cars at the high performance end of the car market. 

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