Every magazine that has one in their long-term fleet writes the same update every month: “it’s a sexy-looking and fun car, but we didn’t drive it much because it spends most of its time in the shop.” I love Alfa and want them to succeed, but goddamn, they’ve really earned that reputation for poor reliability.

For the base or mid tier models yes, but the top tier ones like the Quadrofoglio seemed to have a never ending stream of issues. And that really hurts brand perception.

Yeah, the Vette did, and it was fixed. The Alfa had been in the market for years, and still R&T can't get a hot lap out of it. Teething issues are one thing. That car has been a mess and it's never been addressed.

Alfa rushed the product to market before getting the teething issues out of the way. This isn’t new. If I’m not mistaken the flagship (at the time) Corvette Z06 had overheating problems causing limp mode as well as metal shavings causing many of their engines to self immolate.

I bought a new car this spring and the sales manager at the dealership (not Alfa) was also the manager at their Alfa dealership here in LA. We chatted about the Stelvio while I was waiting for delivery and I mentioned how poor the reviews of the car’s dependability were and his response was ‘people don’t buy them…

The Car&Driver long term review was absolutely brutal, but Alfa released a few commercials for the Giulia and that’s it, not a thing about their legacy or why you should care about the cars they build. Show a montage of old racing footage from the decades, a few flashes of older models like the Spider, and finish by…

One person with one car with no issues is one data point; an anecdote. It’s not data.

That this experience is deemed noteworthy really kind of drives home the point. Two years shouldn’t be a case for reliability. If Alfas were actually reliable, there would be people making this statement, only replacing two years with ten years or more. But there aren’t, because, you know...

Citroën is a misunderstood brand, I think. Will perform very badly in any specification sheet comparison, but there’s nothing like them for relaxed driving dynamics and style.

their dealer network is all but nonexistent as well. most people aren’t going to stumble on them on accident on their way to lease their 4th mercedes.

Came here to post this: Everyone knows Alfas are POS. That seems a lot less tortured than the explanation put forward in the article. I worked at an Alfa dealer in the mid-70s, and nothing has changed with them since then. Not standing by hoping for any changes in my lifetime.

I’m hoping that they’re using all this time and savings from said milking to develop something really awesome.

Not disagreeing. But they need to come up with some original ideas and stop continually milking that platform till the end of time.

A Barracuda or Roadrunner on the Challenger/Charger platform would have probably sold like hotcakes.

it has a ferrari engine. what do you think?

It was doomed... You can’t just create a perception of long term reliability in a couple years, no matter how good your product is.

The Quadrifgiliooifhenckaltr had issues all the way through. Both C&D and MotorTrend reported issues with their long term test vehicles.

I think I saw that road and track still had a quadrofoglio go into limp mode on track. I think the regular models are ok, but when your enthusiast flagship can't run fast without breaking, it's a bad look. 

It was a bad strategy from the start. They should have used the slightly less bad strategy of re-badging one of their pieces of crap under one of the brands that they just purchased so that they would at least have some name recognition.

Possibly with the support of PSA, Alfa Romeo could remain in the market long enough to become a near luxury alternative to the more established brands.