It’s amazing what modern networked cars let you do. Ever since the widespread implementation of CANBUS, settings that were once only adjustable via special computer software can now be tweaked right on the infotainment system. Everything from how long the headlights stay on to illuminate your doorstep after you’ve parked up to what units you want to see on the gauge cluster. It’s allowed for some serious personalization, although sometimes it gets too much. Take the Alfa Romeo Giulia, for example. It has a default setting that’s confounding, and potentially annoying to more than just the driver.
This whole story goes back more than a week, when I realized that some early examples of the Alfa Romeo Giulia have slipped under $10,000. In a fortuitous turn of timing, a brand new Giulia was available for road testing, and while I liked the last Giulia I drove ages ago, I felt like you would want to know if Alfa’s sports sedan is still as good as the initial hype. Stay tuned for that.
However, when I picked up the Giulia and brought it home, I was greeted by something weird. Not a malfunction or anything like that—the car’s been glitch-free so far, which is more than I can say about many new cars—but a feature actually designed into the car. You know how most cars honk the horn if you hit the lock button on the remote twice? Well, the Giulia’s a little bit eager. Reading the owner’s manual produces this little tidbit of information under configurable settings:
“Sound Horn with Lock”: Permits the activation of the horn when the door locking button on the key with remote control is pressed. The options available are “Off”, “1st press”, and “2nd press”
Care to guess what setting was enabled? That’s right, sounding the horn on the first press of the lock button. This would be annoying enough if it were just isolated to the key fob, but it isn’t. Tap the proximity key lock button on the door handle once and the same klaxon blast happens, likely to the chagrin of neighbors.
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Imagine it’s half-past midnight and you just rolled into your driveway, getting home from a late flight or a club meeting or something like that. The neighborhood’s as good as asleep, you’re consciously keeping quiet, but when you go to lock your car: BEEP. Suddenly, you feel like a terrible neighbor as you scan around, seeing if any windows get suddenly illuminated. It’s probably not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but you do end up looking a little bit silly.
Why is this even an option, let alone the first option that appears for horn confirmation? Not only is it one of the few automotive features capable of annoying anyone in a 200-foot radius of the vehicle, but it’s a bit redundant because the Giulia’s alarm system already chirps once upon unlocking and twice upon locking, regardless of the horn confirmation setting. Also, having a horn blast active upon pressing the lock button on the door handle is unnecessary because you’re standing right next to the car. You’ll know if it’s locked or not.
Thankfully, it’s not that difficult to quell this unnecessary honking. Just boot up the infotainment, select the settings tile, scroll down to “Doors & Locks,” and you’ll see another submenu that lets you restrict horn confirmation to the second press of a lock button, or turn it off completely. Strangely, there’s no way of turning off the alarm chirp, and because the horn is directional and mounted way up front, the alarm chirp seems nearly as loud if you’re standing behind the vehicle.
Is the overactive horn a deal-breaker though? Hardly. Just turn the function off and a pair of giant, aluminum, column-mounted paddle shifters will make you forget the unnecessary horn activity is even an option. Or just take a step back and remember that this thing’s achingly pretty. Even with a two-liter four-cylinder engine shared with a Jeep Wrangler, the Giulia is still captivating. Possibly captivating enough that your neighbors will forgive you for the honking.
Top graphic image: Thomas Hundal
Pretty sure this is a Stellanis thing. My 2020 Ram 1500 and my 2023 Chrysler 300C both came from the factory with the setting enabled to honk the horn when you lock the car. Its a setting within the Uconnect system that you can toggle, just as you showed in the Giulia’s screen.
My parent’s Nissan Rogue does the same thing. And they can’t adjust it!
Pretty sure I’m buying one of these, hopefully early next year. The prices for lightly used ones that are just off lease are pretty incredible.
1) Love my Giulia! It’s one of the best cars I’ve ever owned. My son won’t let me sell it, but he doesn’t know it’ll be his when he graduates high school in a year and a half.
2) My neighbors next to my driveway make loud noises all day long and nearly every day since they’re obsessed with their leaf blower and blowing nearly every living thing out of their grass. I mean WAY more than the average leaf blower user. So… the random loud horn blast next to their bedroom doesn’t bother me at all. I leave it on for all of my cars that have it.
We’ve had Giulia Goolia for nearly two years now and it has not been without its faults
To sum it up? It’s Italian and not without drama. Every time I think I should sell it and get something more boring and cheaper, especially for my son, Giulia Goolia looks at me longingly from across the parking lot with that beautiful Italian smile and her sexy form. How can I move on from such a beautiful and fun ride? Her temper is just part of the package. It just makes me realize that I’m not perfect either and how lucky I am to have her in my life because guys like me are lucky to be in her world.
No… my wife is not jealous of her.
DURATION OF HORN WITH LOCK
[5 MIN] [30 MIN] [CEASELESS]
Looking forward to the review! I’ve been looking at these waaay to often lately…thanks for the $10k article…
So there’s an entire article written about being annoyed by a configurable setting? Something you can just turn off? Must be a slow news day.
I don’t know that the Giulia is “achingly pretty” anymore. It was very attractive when new but time hasn’t been kind to it. It’s aging a bit like the jelly bean cars of the early 2000s… everything looks like it’s melting into a blob a bit.
This spec is quite nice though.
So close to Blyat, which is one of my favorite Russian curses to use on a daily basis.
The honking is for blind drivers to know they closed the car
Apparently for deaf drivers too since they can’t hear the chirp.
GM’s are notorious for their abundant overuse of horns when it comes to fob activity. Could it have killed them to fit a $3 speaker to go “beep” to confirm the locking? Same for the Alfa here.
Why are car alarms still a thing? I’m sure it must have taken about a week after they were introduced to become an ignored part of the background during the day and a huge annoyance at night. Nobody looks for the intruder when the car alarm goes off, they just want you to silence it. I dount that an alarm has deterred a thief in the last 30 years.
Now get off my lawn!
I can remember one time as a kid at the grocery store, my mom locked the car with the fob, the battery died, and trying to open it with the key set off the alarm. It was a very primitive system, you couldn’t override it by sticking the key in the ignition like on a modern car. It beeped for 30 minutes, until the battery went dead, and nobody paid any attention to us beyond the occasional glance of annoyance.
Yeah I certainly turned that OFF on my Giulia, but the last couple of cars I had prior (not Alfas) did the same thing on the 2nd press and could *not* be turned off (way more annoying)
How soon will that very pretty green Alfa be a 10,000 used car with low miles? Asking for a friend.
Same, but can’t do green. Not because I don’t like the color, though. Totaled two cars in my life, both green. Don’t want to chance it again, especially with a Guilia.
Pretty sure my coworker has something that blats the horn when he leaves the car and it locks, automatically? Like dude, nobody cares about your Mazda 2 enough to steal anything. You park right in front of the door.
You say that, but I had a set of Rota wheels ($500 including shipping at the time) stolen off of my 05 Scion xB.
It was a townhouse development and the car was parked within two feet of my garage door, and in clear view of 20 other units.
That color is awesome. The noises would be a deal-breaker for me, though. I had a car that didn’t even have a working horn until inspection forced me to get it to work and that’s about the only time I ever used them for decades, though the last few years I have used it to wake up morons scrolling their social conditioning interface after the light turns green. The rest of the time, I figure if I have the time to beep at someone, it wasn’t that much of an emergency and I don’t beep for someone I’m picking up, I go to the door like an adult (or when I wasn’t an adult, use the PA system that made animal noises, I’d usually use the barking dogs, but sometimes the rooster). Don’t like the chirps, either—I lock the car by touching the handle as I walk away and I can hear the locks activate, I don’t need to hear an electronic bird (blue canary in the outlet by the light switch?) getting snuffed-out mid song.
Thats a good color. Still not good enough to subject me to another Stellantis product though.
We had a Stelvio for 3 years and put 65k trouble free miles on it. Only reason we got rid of it was after having a 2nd kid, we needed a 3 row SUV. But we really liked it a lot
Not enough trunk space in the Stelvio?
Not for week long road trips. We traded for a Palisade when our son was a few months old after we did a 4 day trip and barely packed everything in.
Fun fact about the topshot: ‘Blatt’ is the German word for ‘leaf’, and there are lots of leaves on the ground.
It looks like someone is mad about it: “LEAF!”
I thought that was a Nissan.
The newer rams with remote start have an annoying thing where it beeps the horn twice when starting. It gets old rather fast. But still not as bad as some of these newer mustangs starting up. Seems like they could set up a geo fence for the valved exhaust.
My ’14 Compass honks twice with remote start too. I’m 99.9% certain that’s been a Chrysler thing for well over a decade at this point.
Also: any “Mopar” with at least an 8.4-inch touchscreen (I’m not sure about the 5 inch in the older 500L’s or the 7 inches in some current body style Compass & Renegades), there should be an option in the radios to turn that off. That I’m not as sure about, but it can definitely be changed.
Yeah I have a ’18 tradesman with the small screen and I think it was on there. It shows up with idatalink or whatever they call the Chinese equivalent head units. But the default is the two honks and I’m not sure many people change it. I have a few neighbors with newer rams that remote start them a lot always the two honks.
My 2021 GC doesn’t honk when remote starting, but does when I hit the lock button. Might be a setting?
Must be a Stellantis thing. My Dad’s Ram defaulted the same way, which was super annoying if you needed to get in the truck late at night in a quiet campground.
I agree. Parents visited with a Pacifica rental and it also beeped/honked all the time
So far my neighbors have been surprisingly chill. I mean, I don’t have an Alfa Romeo that honks all the time, but I have an old Subaru that leaks all kinds of colorful rusty stuff into the street.
You can lump this in with all the cars with a “hot start” option. Nothing says f u neighbor like a sports car roaring to life every single freaking time it starts. That shit gets old real fast.
There’s a guy (seemingly a flat brimmed hat bro 20 something) who’s got an aftermarket fart can muffler on his Crosstrek and revs it high in our neighborhood ….. every day. I’ve given him the one finger salute a few times, he doesn’t rev near my house anymore. Sure hope he grows out of it, better yet sells the car. So yeah I get it that it gets old. Get off my lawn!
Give it a few weeks, he’ll stop when the CVT dies.
You know what other feature some cars have that’s annoying? The off-throttle snap, crackle and pop exhaust sounds.
In the old days, cars did that because of incomplete combustion.
These days, manufacturers are designing this into their fucking exhausts and it’s fucking stupid and annoying.
In my area, there is one idiot regularly driving around and driving in a way to deliberately make his POS BMW with this stupid POS “feature” make as much popping sounds as possible.
These dipshits are only slightly less annoying than the Harley-loud-pipes dipshits.
Oh. My. God. There is also BMW that resides near me that does this and it drives me insane. They also speed on our residential road which is one of my triggers. That exhaust though. It really pushing my rage button.
Do you all live in my neighborhood? Because there’s an idiot in a BMW doing exactly the same thing. I’m sensing a theme here…
Had some flat-brim chimp in a shitty Veloster doing that on the highway near me a few weeks ago. Don’t know if it was for my benefit or he just drives it like it has an aircraft rotary engine, but he was near me for miles and I wanted to punt him off the road. He was also aggressively alternately tailgating the guy in front of him, who moved, but he still didn’t pass him. There is nothing that could happen to him that would make me feel bad.
It may not (always) be intentional. I had an M3 for a while and by default, the exhaust pops are forced on in sport mode. They were only off for the ‘economy’ mode, which well, it’s an M3.
It only took about a week of that for me to look up how to turn them off permanently with a programming change, but not everyone is going to bother. And if I remember right your choices were ‘always off, even in track mode’ or ‘only off in eco mode’, no in between. I could reasonably believe some people leave it on without actually wanting to make noise around the neigborhood.
The lock button should not be the horn. The ideal is the little chirp that the 90s and 00s cars would do when you hit the lock button. That should have never gone away.
If I understood the article correctly, this car has the chirp and the bizarro world horn alert.
Second quick press should trigger the horn, so you can hear it if you’ve walked away from the car and are unsure if you’ve locked it or not (done that many times).
Losing the chirp is my second greatest fear if my Acura ever needs replacing. The #1 fear is an internet connection, ties with capacitive or touch screen controls.