Yahoo Autos 2024 Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio Review: A Glorious Hot Mess
The 2024 Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio is a deeply flawed vehicle. What’s more, it is a deeply flawed vehicle that, after this year, will no longer be made. So… good riddance, right? Wrong.
The Basics
Hot take: I’ve personally never been that big of a fan of Alfa Romeo’s styling. The triangle grille looks silly and this candy-red Stelvio, with its stilted stance and curvy surfaces, reminds me of the apple car driven by Lowly Worm. Other people seem to like it, though, routinely garnering glances, stares, and at least one excited Alfisti who hovered around it in a parking lot waiting to talk to me about it. New for 2024 are “Trilobe” LED matrix headlights and a 12.3-inch digital instrument screen with a selectable retro theme.
Yep, just like the new Ford Mustang and its Fox Body clocks, the Stelvio lets you have its gauges look like that of an old Alfa Romeo. As for the rest of the interior, it’s an attractively designed space in photographs but, in real life, materials look and feel cheaper than they ought to. Key touch points are pleasantly exotic—peep the Alcantara on the steering wheel and big, metal shift paddles—but knobs, switches, and brightwork on the dash feel very much picked out of the CDJR parts bin.
Hilarious Alfa Things
Even if it weren’t a Stellantis product, though, you get the sense that the Stelvio wouldn’t be any better built anyhow because here’s a list of Hilarious Alfa Things I found with this car:
There’s a slot to put the key fob beside the shifter, but I was able to simply… pull the little rubber thing inside it clean out with my hand with very little effort. An easy souvenir if you ever find yourself sitting in one of these in a dealership or at an auto show.
The sun visor is shaped so that there’s a sizeable gap where sunlight often perfectly peeks through to hit your eye, defeating the purpose of having a sun visor at all.
The 8.8-inch touchscreen isn’t quite perfectly aligned with the bezel that surrounds it. The margin is admittedly minuscule, but once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
A day into this weeklong test, it threw a light telling me to service the parking brake.
On a possibly related note, the parking brake did not disengage automatically when I put it in drive like every other car with an electronic parking brake does.
When I turn it off at night or in a dark garage, it does that thing where it keeps the lights on for a bit, as most cars do. Here, though, the car likes to throw up a warning message on the dash protesting that the lights are indeed still on. As if turning them off eventually isn’t its own friggin’ job.
The turn signals sound irritatingly weird. One passenger went as far as describing them as “creepy.”
Column-mounted shift paddles are nonsensical, and I will not be entertaining rebuttals at this time. (However, if your rebuttal boils down to “Ferrari has them on the column!” I’d like to kindly point out: Except for the one Charles Leclerc races, right?)
On the steering wheel, the Stelvio uses buttons for volume control and a scroll wheel to change between tracks/channels when it should really be the other way around. Funnily enough, this appears to be a 2024 model year Alfa development because based on some cursory Google Image searches, the 2023 steering wheel indeed had these the other way around.
Despite this car starting at $90,000, Apple CarPlay is wired.
Alfa is admittedly not the only manufacturer to do this but when you put your phone on the wireless charger, a big, annoying pop-up appears on the touchscreen telling you that your phone is now charging. Yes, Alfa, I know it is charging, I just put it on the charger.
Despite this car starting at $90,000, there is no heads-up display.
The last time I found this many things wrong with a car and made a list like this, I somewhat rudely compared it to an irritating coworker and even earned myself A Phone Call from the people who loaned it to me. To the Alfa flacks reading this, you can tell your eyelids to stop twitching and put the phone down because, unlike the irredeemably shitty last-gen Subaru Forester, all of the Stelvio Quadrifoglio’s flaws are predictably forgiven once you point it at an empty backroad. If the Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT is the most effective performance SUV I’ve ever driven, this is probably the most enjoyable.
Driving the Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio
Under the hood is a Ferrari-derived, 2.9-liter twin-turbo V6 making 505 horsepower and 443 lb-ft of torque. Zero to 60 mph happens in 3.6 seconds and top speed sits at 176. The steering, though, is the highlight. Firmly feeling like a bona fide sports car on stilts, the Stelvio Quadrifoglio unironically steers better than most sports sedans. It’s quick, light, so precise, and simply fun as heck.
The whole car, in fact, feels light for its size—4,313 pounds is about 300 pounds lighter than the competing BMW X3 M—and there’s a visceral personality in the way it moves. It isn’t harsh, though. Fluid in the corners and composed in the suspension, it’s just serious enough without feeling like overkill or like a car that you’d only want to take out on weekends.
That engine is powerful, but in spite of its Ferrari origins, a farty-sounding V6 is still a farty-sounding V6. This may be another unpopular opinion but Quadrifoglio doesn’t sound all that great to me; the aforementioned BMW’s S58 straight-six makes a nicer noise. The volume of that exhaust, though, is perfectly calibrated. Not too loud, not too quiet, and it does make some fairly hilarious ripping noises on upshifts, so there’s that.
Speaking of, the eight-speed automatic transmission—the same ZF unit found in everything from Aston Martins to the Jeep goshdarn Gladiator—is as competent as ever. Paddle-operated manual shifts happen quickly enough and those paddles, even though they’re irrationally mounted to the column, are big, metal, and meaty. The brakes are strong and do their job, but pedal feel isn’t all that remarkable. They’re just brakes.
Special commendation, however, to whoever was in charge of the Stelvio Quad’s drive modes. There’s dynamic, natural, and advanced efficiency (i.e. sport, normal, and eco) as well as a no-holds-barred Race mode. Silly names aside, they really do make a huge difference in how this thing drives. Natural and Race feel like completely different cars—Race mode holds gears longer, it’s louder, and the whole thing squares up for battle.
Within the drive mode dial is a dedicated button to adjust dampers, which lets you very easily and very quickly make the suspension softer while keeping everything else sporty. Because that’s pretty much always what you want on a backroad, isn’t it? It’s little things like this where you can tell this car was engineered, designed, and cooked up by people who understand and love driving. If you’re a regular reader of this site, this is an SUV made for you and me.
That said, even in the softest mode, the dampers are relatively stiff. It’s not track-car egregious, but if most of the driving you do in this thing is over rough roads, you’ll likely wish you got something softer. The price to pay for class-leading twisty road handling. As another drivability criticism, normal mode almost always keeps the car in too high of a gear, almost to the point of lugging. This being a capital-P performance SUV, the front seats aren’t exactly cushy or sumptuous but they’re comfortable enough, with no noticeable aches or pains after a couple of hours of driving.
The Verdict
What a cool car this is, though. That coolness may sometimes manifest through misaligned screens, nonsensical steering wheels, and key holders that can’t even hold their own rubber cushions. But it also manifests through steering that’s more satisfying than pretty much every other SUV’s, a chassis that feels lighter, and a drive that’s nimbler.
No, the Alfa doesn’t have that granite-reliable quality in the hands you get with, say, a Porsche or even a BMW but it also doesn’t take itself nearly as seriously. The retro gauges, the Ferrari-sourced engine that doesn’t actually sound that great, the useless sun visors, it all adds up to what I believe people call “character.”
In many ways, I get why this thing is going away. It’s flawed, arguably expensive for what you get, and stiff, abundant competition from Germany has not made its life any easier. The 2024 Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio is janky and objectively bad in a fair amount of ways, but on a lonely, twisty road with nothing but time and fuel on your hands, you can’t help but be glad it existed at one point in time. And if that’s not a proper Alfa Romeo, I’m not sure what is.
2024 Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio Specs | |
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Got a tip or question for the author about the Stelvio Quadrifoglio? You can reach him here: chris.tsui@thedrive.com
