The Macan Turbo killer... - Alfa Romeo Stelvio

[VanB]

Alfas are great driver's cars - when they are roadworthy. Unfortunately they are rarely roadworthy or even working so would you pay £60k for a car that spends half its time back at the dealer and loses most of its value in 3 years? I know I wouldn't but I'd love a spin in one.

[Yanwoo]

Alfa Romeo Stelvio SUV priced from £33,990...https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/moto ... C2%A333990

No word on the 500bhp Quadrifoglio price though.

[Dandock]

I remember when the Alphasud TI was a benchmark for small FWDs. Great car with a brilliant high-revving boxer engine - if you had very short legs and could get it in first gear- and until it rained - then it just turned brown!

[Col Lamb]

I remember when the Alphasud TI was a benchmark for small FWDs. Great car with a brilliant high-revving boxer engine - if you had very short legs and could get it in first gear- and until it rained - then it just turned brown!

Looking at the bright side at least with the Alfasud the engine stayed with the car, yet with the Lancia Beta a heavy foot resulted in the engine driving off on its own.

[Dandock]

I remember when the Alphasud TI was a benchmark for small FWDs. Great car with a brilliant high-revving boxer engine - if you had very short legs and could get it in first gear- and until it rained - then it just turned brown!

Looking at the bright side at least with the Alfasud the engine stayed with the car, yet with the Lancia Beta a heavy foot resulted in the engine driving off on its own.

[bigbaldybloke]

Lots of comments about Alfa reliability, but a recent survey put Porsche almost at the bottom, 36th out of 37 if my memory is correct, and so far my Porsche experience backs that up. My Macan has been in three times in the last three months for the same fault, taking a week or more each time so that's 25% of the time in the garage, and this latest time even my Cayenne courtesy car had a failure on the lighting system that brought up a message saying service required and the car had done less than 500 miles. The self levelling seemed to have failed and I had one very wayward headlight one evening. Mind you I do agree that Afla residual values will be rubbish compared with Porsche unless you buy an 8C.

[jk88]

Sat in a Stelvio at Goodwood FOS. Seats were flat and unsupportive and there were acres of hard plastic wherever you looked. I've seen Vauxhall do a better job. Might be worth a look if you're considereing a Nissan Qashqai IMO.

[Monty2]

I like the aero detail on the sills in the photo, wait, yes, I've seen it before -
On my Wife's other car bought yesterday our quirky Kia Soul Maxx
I was lured by the Alfa GTV in 1996 yes a few problems Bonnet a different colour red to the rest of the car (actually the black primer coat was showing through the ultra thin top coat and then there were the electrical gremlins after about 2 thousand miles. Oh! and then the tyre wear on the rears outside tread absolutely fine at 6 ish thousand miles inside 25% worn to the cords I sold it after 18 months for a LR Disco and then I disco-vered real car woes.
Never been back to Alfa again sadly spent many a £ on LR/RR
Reliability, safety, consistency of performance as advertised and overall quality that'll be your Porsche

Paul

[happy days]

I had an Alfa 156 once. Best seats I've ever sat in. You could sit in the car for 8 hours straight and get out fully fresh. The job I was doing at the time involved about 50k miles a year so it was a good choice.

But the reliability? I put 7 sumps into it because the front suspension could not handle the weight of the 5 cylinder engine. It just continually bottomed out and shaved the aluminium sump away. I even got a stainless steel sump guard manufactured, but even that wore out. It also blew a turbo after about 70k miles and the smoke it put out made Chernobyl look healthy. It also had a healthy appetite for front tyres which it wore out completely on the inside edge while the outers were fine, despite the wheel alignment being confirmed as correct by a number of different testing stations. In the end I gave up and traded it for a Golf.

[Tim92gts]

Only problem I had with 3.0 Alfa 75s was a suspected leaky injector which caused an explosion in the manifold on startup. You could actually see the bonnet flex as the intake blew upwards. After a while just pushing it back down so the intake was back into it's rubber tubes I tightened all the jubilee clips so it blew up the MAF housing instead.
The transaxle gearboxes both got a bit sloppy around 70k but no problems on my last 400 mile drive to an Edinburgh Porsche dealer on 8th Jan 1996.
Never looked back!