► Swings meet roundabouts with our Alfa
► Fiddly alloys and ancient infotainment
► Read month 5
If you had to make a table listing your car’s good and bad points, how even would the columns be? Glancing through the notebook that lives in the Stelvio’s door pocket it seems to have generated ‘love it!’ and ‘loathe it’ comments in equal measure.
Some of those you could learn on a simple test drive with your Alfa dealer before deciding to pull the pin on an order. Or, less neatly, you might discover them on the way back from picking up that order, knowing you’ve made your bed and have to lie in it for three years.
But other traits are the sort of thing you only notice after living with a car for several months, as we have.
Take the wheels. They’re not the optional 21s, just the standard 20s, but they look fantastic. You don’t need to rack up 9000 miles to know that. But one of my favourite things about them, something you only appreciate over a longer test, is how easy they are to clean.
I hate cleaning most alloys wheels; they’re often overly fiddly and it annoys me that you can’t easily reach the brake calipers to spiv them up without taking the entire wheel off.
That’s not a problem on ordinary cars, but it’s annoying on performance cars whose brakes are meant to be seen, like the £450 optional red calipers on our car. But the Stelvio’s wheel design makes cleaning them a cinch. You can even reach through and clean the backside of the wheel barrel if you want to go full OCD.
Against all odds, because they look very vulnerable, we’ve so far managed to keep those rims free of kerb rash. Which is down to good luck and old-fashioned use of the side mirror, not because the Stelvio has an ace surround-view parking system. It doesn’t, making do instead with simple front and rear parking sensors and a rear-view camera whose image on the centre touchscreen is small and looks like it was shot on a 20-year-old phone.
The entire media system feels equally ancient. In size, style and response it’s miles behind what you get in a modern German car. Like those rivals, the Stelvio now has a digital instrument pack, though it’s not as versatile as some other systems. Switching to Race using the mode dial on the centre console replaces the twin mph and rpm dials with one centrally-located rev counter, a gimmicky g-meter and a welcome splash of extra colour.
It looks better and is easier to read than the default display, but it’s a shame you can’t enjoy it without Race mode’s angrier powertrain map, which adds to the excitement on open roads but makes town driving edgy and jerky. BMW M cars let drivers mix and match their favourite settings and even store two configurations, but you can’t do that in the Quadrifoglio.
Newer tech doesn’t always mean better. I’m all for the Stelvio’s trad gearstick, the rotary heater controls, twirl-able volume knob and circular infotainment wheel. What are the chances of any of that stuff lasting into the next generation of Alfa SUV? Slim, I imagine.
The 2.9-litre V6 won’t live on when the Giulia and Stelvio Quadrifoglio are phased out. It’s a good engine but not outstanding. The 3.0 straight-six in a BMW X4 M makes only slightly less power (503 versus 513bhp), but more torque (480 versus 443lb ft), sounds better at low speed and gobbles far less fuel while spewing out less CO2. We’ll still be sorry to see the 2.9 go.
There are plenty more loves and loathes in the notebook, but they seem to be keeping each other in check. And anyway, it’s an Alfa. It’s hard to dislike an Alfa no matter how uneven the columns are.
Read month 5
Read month 4
Read month 3
Read month 2
Read month 1
Logbook: Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio
Price £87,195 (£90,745 as tested)
Performance 2891cc twin-turbo V6, 513bhp, 3.8sec 0-62mph, 177mph
Efficiency 23.9mpg (official), 19.9mpg (tested), 267g/km CO2
Energy cost 34.0p per mile
Miles this month 301
Total miles 8998