They get you on the out lap. Warming tires and brain, the car slipping and goosing around. You play with things: Oh, hey, the brakes work like this! The steering works like that! It seems easy. Then easier. Then you’re four corners in and wringing through a greasy little third-gear slide, laughing. You start wondering if you could do 80-mph slides with your eyes closed. It’s an M3 with better steering and more suspension compliance, a C63 with a razor-sharp front axle, a big, snorty pile of animal noises that somehow manages to also be delicate and composed and just flat-out blessedly intoxicating.

It is the 505-hp, rear-drive, triangle-faced Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio, and there is no other new car like it. Which is both why you should want one like fire, and also why you should not give FiatChrysler a red cent of your money in exchange for keys until they take the car and fix it.

Last week, this magazine took a Giulia to Gingerman Raceway, in Southwest Michigan. The Quadrifoglio, the most powerful Giulia sold, and ostensibly built for that environment. But the trip did not go well. I got that out lap, or most of one. I also got no more than that. Not a single complete lap. I tried several times, but on a mild summer day, the car couldn’t make it through a single lap. It kept breaking.

I had been looking forward to that moment for two years.

I had been looking forward to that moment for two years. Two years! An eternity in the world of new cars, especially when you’re waiting for something you want. The first new Alfa sport sedan in America in 20 years. Alfa, one of the winningest marques in history, a grand-prix house that all but established the sport that became Formula 1. The carmaker built on the back of the race team that once employed a young Enzo Ferrari, the place that effectively gave the great man his start in the business. That welcomed and developed artists like Tazio Nuvolari, Vittorio Jano, Giuseppe Busso. They engineered or drove some of the greatest four-wheeled machines the world has ever seen.

The first time that check light lit, I winced, then parked the car to let it cool. I sat, sighing, in the paddock. Alfa is an Italian brand; it is owned and operated by FiatChrysler. You can’t think about this stuff without wishing that stereotypes didn't exist. Italian history by way of Italian bureaucracy by way of a company with a substantial presence in Detroit. They can build a factory Dodge Challenger that runs nines in the quarter, I found myself thinking, but an Italian M3 that doesn’t poop on your shoes? Apparently too much to ask.



The Race Mode display when it’s functioning properly. DW Burnett/Puppyknuckles

The Gingerman track day that I attended was broken into 20-minute sessions. I tried to drive the Giulia in three of them. Each time, when the car began to misbehave, I pulled into the pits and reset the ignition, to let things cool. Switch off, wait a bit. First twenty minutes. Then an hour. It didn’t make a difference. When I left the pits, with Race Mode on and stability control off, the car ran normally. By the time I reached the track’s back half, less than a mile later, the Alfa had thrown a check-engine light, reactivated its stability control, and dumped its drive mode back into Normal. (Modern Alfas offer four drive modes: Dynamic, Normal, All-Weather, and Race. Normal is the tamest.) Usually in the middle of a corner.

It was clear the problem wasn’t going to solve itself, so we took the car back to the office, two hours away.



A day later, as I write this, the light still hasn’t gone out. I drove less than a mile at Gingerman, at the kind of safe pace you might use on a back road. Earlier that day, R&T’s editor-in-chief, Kim Wolfkill, did a 20-minute session in the car without trouble.

When we told FiatChrysler that we were taking the Giulia to the track, the PR department sent a prep sheet with tire pressures and a few pieces of advice. If you see a rise in lap times, the sheet said, stop every three laps to let the car’s differential cool. I know what they meant by that line, and that various preproduction Giulia probably saw thousands of miles of track testing without issue. This is just how the development of high-performance cars work; most durability or behavior troubles come somewhere between final engineering sign-off and dealer showroom. When you set out to build a new car, especially a fast one, actually producing that car, thousands of examples a month, to a set of engineering tolerances, is half the challenge. That line about diff temps was probably aimed at those chasing all-out lap times; it’s doubtful that Alfa engineers actually thought the thing would give up.

But I couldn’t help thinking of history: That sheet, from a company that used to enter ordinary production cars in the Mille Miglia. A 1000-mile, nonstop, no-holds-barred race across rural Italy.

If there is an afterlife, then it contains Busso, one of the company’s genius postwar engineers, laughing at that bit about stopping every three laps.

DW Burnett/Puppyknuckles

The whole experience was oddly crushing. Let me tell you a weird quirk about this business: You drive fast cars for a living, you get used to outlandish stuff. You also develop weird priorities, because you get a hell of a sense for what makes a good car, and how truly rare those qualities are. By way of example, I once drifted a million-dollar Jaguar D-Type and a seven-figure BMW 3.0 CSL race car in the same day. An impossibly wonderful afternoon, one of the best days I’ve ever had, and a look into two of the most magical designs of the 20th century. Maybe I’m dumb, but I was equally as excited about the opportunity to drive the Giulia on a small, quiet road course in a field in Michigan.

Perspective is the problem. Or maybe a lack of it. Most new cars are not blood-hearted; the Giulia is. It is built by a company known for building great things. It has one hell of a spec sheet. It is truly spectacular on a back road. It looks amazing; it pulls people off sidewalks at intersections. On top of that, it's the first Alfa sport sedan sold in America in two decades, since the marque left this country in the mid-1990s. An entire generation has grown up since, hearing and reading about golden Alfas of old. How those cars melded romance and history with practicality and genius tuning. Until now, those people have never been able to buy a new one.

Like a lot of people, I wanted to love it. Partly because of this, I did love it.

The Giulia was released to American media, and sold to the general public, late last year. It immediately rang every bell that every European-car dork ever had. Like a lot of people, I wanted to love it. Partly because of this, I did love it. I was excited in a way that would border on embarrassing, were I not a shameless nerd. I was a middle-class high-school kid in the 1990s, and I did not have the money to buy a new car. I am now a 36-year-old dude with two young kids and a mortgage. When they launched the Giulia, I couldn’t stop wondering. A Quadrifoglio was out of budget. Maybe, I thought, I could squeeze into one of the cheaper versions. Maybe the 2.0-liter. Maybe buy a used Quadrifoglio in five or six years. The weird little primal-animal core of my brain got squinchy and started yelling unreasonable, impossible things inside my head: Even a 2.0-liter with a wheel missing and an engine full of rod knock would be fantastic, it said. In the way that every Alfa ever built is fantastic.

As an isolated incident, my track experience would not be abnormal. Race tracks impart an abnormally high amount of load and heat stress on vehicles. Every year, we see a handful of new, track-focused cars that do not behave as their makers say they should. Even the ones you think should be exempt. In 2015, when we gave our annual Performance Car of the Year Award to the Ford GT350, it was after track-testing two separate examples, both on loan from the manufacturer. The first one had production issues—since fixed by Ford—that caused the car to overheat under extreme load. Like the Alfa, it went into limp mode after a single lap. Ford shipped in another GT350 as a replacement, and our testing was completed successfully. (We deemed the car good enough to outweigh its maladies.)

DW Burnett/Puppyknuckles

After a decade and a half in the business, I have a host of stories like this. But the Alfa is different. My last Giulia press car—two months ago, in Seattle—idled so unevenly, the cabin rocked. Its transmission didn’t like pulling away from stoplights, either slipping excessively or jerking to speed from a stop. Earlier this year, when our digital director, Travis Okulski, had a test Giulia, the headlight washer cover fell off, the seat-height adjuster came away in his hands, and the radio refused to change stations.

Nor are we alone. As Jalopnik recently noted:

The above lines were published a day after Jalopnik’s editor-in-chief, Patrick George, found himself on the side of I-87 with a Giulia that simply stopped running. The same exact vehicle that R&T's web team had a week earlier, which also threw a check engine light. Motor Authority went to Gingerman and had issues. Finally, R&T’s sister publication, Car and Driver, has seen three test Giulias to date. The first one, a Quadrifoglio, forced itself into limited-power efficiency mode whenever you remote-started the car. It wouldn’t leave that mode unless you reset it with a code reader. The next car, another Quadrifoglio, at the magazine’s annual Lightning Lap track test, refused to rev to the end of the tach. It threw trouble codes, lit the check-engine light, and started short-shifting. The most recent car that C/D tested, a 2.0-liter base model, jammed its sunroof open. The headliner-mounted switch console also stopped working. Someone eventually got the roof to close, but the car spent the rest of its time at the magazine with a note attached. It said something like, WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T OPEN THE SUNROOF.



I asked C/D’s technical director, Eric Tingwall, if there was a common thread. “They don’t fail with any kind of consistency, in my experience,” he said. “It’s not like there’s just one component that’s causing this. It’s not just Quads, it’s Quads and 2.0-liters, engines and transmissions.” A few weeks ago, when Tingwall left to test the Alfa Stelvio SUV in Tennessee, he reluctantly packed a code reader in his luggage, assuming it might come in handy. He didn’t need it, but, “Within two miles of finishing the drive, I’m pulling up to the hotel, and the auto-start-stop icon on the dash lit up with a warning light next to it.”

We asked Alfa Romeo about the the issues seen with its vehicles, media testers or otherwise. The company declined to comment.

Update, July 20, 2017: One day after we published this piece, an Alfa Romeo executive provided comment on the issues experienced with this Giulia. See the note below.

A Giulia Ti we recently tested that threw a check engine light. And the same Giulia that nearly left the Jalopnik staff stranded on the highway. DW Burnett/Puppyknuckles

Every new car has teething issues, and press cars are notoriously ridden hard and put away wet. But this kind of behavior is remarkable. And yet, for a certain set, the Giulia remains undeniably compelling. Maybe you’ve read the reviews or burned through YouTube videos of the car sliding around. If you do that and don’t want the thing even a tiny bit, you are probably the kind of person who watches a lot of C-SPAN on Friday nights while eating cold beefaroni from a can and wondering if your life is too dangerous. ("The sharpness of those edges! People die from tetanus every day, you know!”)

Granted, by FCA’s own sales reports, even that set is relatively small. Alfa sold 992 Giulias in America in June of 2017. A new, mass-production car, less than a year old. For perspective, BMW moved 19,629 cars that month, across its lineup; the 3-series sedan and 4-series coupe, analogous to the Giulia, represent almost half that.



Italian performance cars have not been known for durability and reliability.

It’s not like the Giulia's odds weren’t difficult to begin with. Most people in this business did not expect the car to sell well, at least initially. Alfas carry a lot of figurative baggage, especially in America. No one should envy the FCA people charged with selling the things. They must deal with everything from a brand-new and relatively small dealer network to rampant stereotyping on the part of customers.

In a business where image and perceived quality matter far more than performance, the latter is a particularly tall hurdle. Alfas are Italian, for one; historically, Italian performance cars have not been known for durability and reliability, and this country’s use patterns are hard on any vehicle. And then there’s the simple matter of history: In the 1990s, when Alfa bailed out of America, its cars were far from well-made. They had been on a slow downward trajectory on that front for decades, since the marque’s 1950–1975 golden age.

And that’s the sad bit: In the Sixties, Alfa Romeos weren’t half amazing and half shit. They were mostly amazing and somewhat crap, but the crap was tolerable, if you were a certain kind of person. You had to let emotion and balance and the love song of the universe trump things like relatively short maintenance intervals or interior materials with the half-life of a banana. Next to something like a Ford or a Mercedes-Benz, the cars took effort and tolerance to own and live with but they offered much of the drama of an Italian exotic—a taste of Ferrari feel, at a fraction of the price, in a form you could use every day. Generally speaking, the reviews from Alfa’s golden age do not mention extreme unreliability or shoddy materials. The cars that built the brand’s myth were lovely machines, quirky but not half-baked.

DW Burnett/Puppyknuckles

I know this perhaps too intimately. In another life, I spent a couple of years working as a professional Alfa mechanic. Emotionally speaking, the Giulia does not even nip at the heels of the marque's best vintage cars. But no modern car does; new cars generally trade raw, hairy-chested fun for safety, comfort, reliability, and performance, and society is a safer, smarter place for it. If you discount the media's experience with Giulia reliability, the car is a far more complete automobile than anything the brand has ever sold in America. It’s also the most emotionally satisfying four-door on the market, by a long shot. You lean on the thing in a corner and your knees go liquid. The car has real steering feel and feels a fraction of its size and weight. For a 3800-pound, electronically managed machine burdened with the same compromises as every other modern vehicle, that's a rare, miraculous achievement.



In other words, my attachment is perhaps the point: Alfas matter to people, and that connection came about organically. In a world where branding is often more important than substance, you can ape legitimacy or history–and a lot of carmakers do–but that's no substitute for the real thing. There’s something about the feeling and the stories attached to Alfa–for the right kind of person, it makes a face-plant like the Giulia, right out of the gate, an odd kind of gutting. You get worked up, over a new car, far out of proportion. When I climbed out of the car at Gingerman, and later, when I pored through online reports of the Alfa’s troubles, I grew quietly angry, almost physically disappointed.

We are, after all, talking about a car company. Not a person or even a consistent assemblage of people. An old car company, owned by a giant corporation, the subject of countless poor choices throughout history, making more poor choices, overlooking details. Who gets worked up about that? Why the hell did it matter so much?

But that’s human feeling for you—rarely simple or easily explained. Like the appeal of a good car.

DW Burnett/Puppyknuckles

Let’s take a moment to talk directly to FiatChrysler: Guys. History, public perception, and stereotype mean that you’re already fighting an uphill battle in this country. You can’t not know that. How did this happen? What in blazes is going on?

I’ve always been one of the hopeful Alfa suckers. The wrenching, for one. But also a lifelong love affair compounded by the astounding privileges of this strange and wonderful job. I was once somehow lucky enough to slide Nuvolari’s Nurburgring-winning Tipo B around a track. I’ve helped set up Alfa Trans-Am race cars. I’ve driven almost every postwar Alfa model sold in this country. None of which is worth diddly in the real world except to let me say that I know where you came from. I know how reliable old Alfas were and still are, how much they love abuse. In 2017, this is all embarrassing, disappointing, unnecessary, and dumb. You owe it to the badge, the people who love it, and the soul of the thing: Do better.

Update from Alfa Romeo: Reid Bigland, head of Alfa Romeo, reached R&T one day after this post was originally published. "I want to apologize for providing a vehicle that fell short of expectations, and that, frankly, is not even recognizable as the Alfa Romeo Giulia that I've come to know over the past 12 months," Bigland said.

The executive said that our test car was delivered to the track directly from the factory, bypassing the normal dealer inspection process. FCA has noted some software issues with this model, remedied by reflashes; Bigland surmised that our test car hadn't received the latest software updates, potentially explaining the malfunction lights and unusual behavior of our car. Bigland points out that 88 percent of North American Giulia owners give the car a 9 or 10 rating on customer surveys, and that more than 500 journalists worldwide have reviewed the car with "overwhelmingly positive feedback and praise."