Why The 2025 Alfa Romeo Giulia Is Hard To Justify But Effortless To Love

I’m not a betting man, but if I had to wager a guess, I’d say that almost nobody in America has bought an Alfa Romeo by accident. The average person doesn’t wake up, drive to their local Honda dealer to look at a CR-V, get distracted, walk next door, and end up driving off in an Alfa Romeo Giulia. Maybe they should.

Sure, the Giulia is old, eight model years old to be precise. It’s also a bit expensive, prone to depreciation, has a relatively small dealer network, and you’ll have to hear those jokes from your painfully unfunny uncle every Thanksgiving. If we drove cars by spreadsheet with robotic calculation, buying a Giulia would be unthinkable. Thank goodness we don’t, and that we’re aggregate, emotional mounds of meat instead.

[Full disclosure: Alfa Romeo Canada let me borrow this Giulia for a week so long as I kept the shiny side up, returned it reasonably clean with a full tank of premium fuel, and reviewed it.]

The Basics

Engine: Two-liter turbocharged inline-four.

Transmission: Eight-speed torque converter automatic.

Drive: Standard rear-wheel-drive in America, optional (standard in Canada) full-time all-wheel-drive, available limited-slip rear differential.

Output: 280 horsepower, 306 lb.-ft. of torque.

Fuel Economy: 24 MPG city, 33 MPG highway, 27 MPG combined for rear-wheel-drive models, 23 MPG city, 31 MPG highway, 26 MPG combined (10.5 L/100km city, 7.7 L/100km highway, 9.2 L/100km combined) for all-wheel-drive models.

Base Price: $47,245 including freight ($64,590 Canadian).

Price As-Tested: $59,245 ($73,290 Canadian).

Why Does It Exist?

Roughly a decade ago, Alfa Romeo decided it was time to build another rear-wheel-drive sports sedan. After all, we’re talking about the company that practically invented the compact sports sedan before the BMW 2002 was a twinkle in Max Hoffman’s eye. The result involved bringing aboard the chassis engineer for the Ferrari 458 Speciale, assembling a dream team, and going to town. While the 191-MPH Giulia Quadrifoglio is the model that dropped jaws from Milan, Italy to Milan, Michigan, a lot of the goodness trickled down into the entry-level car. Something to fight the BMW 3 Series with.

How Does It Look?

When the Alfa Romeo Giulia debuted, it was one of the prettiest things on the planet with four doors. The better part of a decade later, and it’s still right up there. We’re talking about a sedan that’s simply well-proportioned and well-surfaced, even if the facelift headlights perhaps aren’t as pure as the original projectors. They do offer great throw though, so that’s a worthwhile tradeoff. There’s still a want-one factor to this car, something that makes you turn your head when one goes past on the street. Anything that can do that for eight-plus years on the trot is a special machine indeed.

It’s also worth talking about this color, named Verde Fangio after Formula 1 champion Juan Manuel Fangio. Proper pub quiz stuff, and although it carries an eye-watering price tag of $2,200 ($2,500 in Canada), it’s a spectacular high-metallic that’s just so rich. Given the Intensa trim’s standard gold accents, green’s just the move here, yeah?

What About The Interior?

If you want proof that newer isn’t always better, just slide inside an Alfa Romeo Giulia. It doesn’t have enough ambient lighting for a Twitch streamer’s bedroom or an infotainment screen stolen from a Burger King drive-thru. Instead, you’ll find real switchgear, nice leathers, soft yet supportive seats, and relatively little distraction. This Italian cockpit was once chided for feeling a bit cheap, but guess what? Not only has Alfa Romeo improved some of the materials, many competitors haven’t exactly improved material quality. Anyway, the other big highlight here is ergonomic positioning. You sit nice and low in the car, yet the dashboard is low too. The seats are wonderful, as is the rake and reach adjustment on the steering wheel, as is the pedal box. Oh, and check out those paddle shifters. Talk about exotic energy.

Then again, strange little quirks are also exotic, and the Alfa has a few. Right off the bat, its B-pillar is quite far forward. Fine if you’re five-foot-ten and reasonably limber, but I suspect it could get annoying if you’re tall. At the same time, the trunk is a bit shallow, the rotary controller takes a little getting used to due to input lag, and only the front shade of the available twin-panel moonroof is motorized. You know, the one you can actually reach from the driver’s seat. Oh, and the turn signal stalk’s a bit mental. It’s one of those electronic self-centering units, except to manually cancel your indicator, it must be moved slightly in the opposite direction of the blinker, not in the same direction. Press too firm, and the other blinker’s on. And you know what? I don’t care.

How Does It Drive?

Under the hood of the Giulia, you’ll find a two-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine largely shared with the Jeep Wrangler. The Alfa got it first, but this should be a sign of the powertrain character here. The official redline starts south of 6,000 RPM, a broad plateau of peak torque arrives at 2,000 RPM, and that’s about all you need to know. It doesn’t encourage you to really wind it out, but it’s certainly effective. Combined with an eight-speed automatic, it’s stout enough to propel this sedan to 60 MPH in well under six seconds, and giant metal column-mounted paddle shifters add huge drama, especially once you flip the drive mode into dynamic to get rid of any gearbox sogginess.

Besides, you don’t buy a base Giulia for the engine, you buy it for the way it handles. Sure, the steering doesn’t offer huge feedback, but it’s lightning-quick, accurate, well-weighted, and serves up a dollop of real road texture. You know, the thing that tells you that your car’s fine and it’s just the tarmac that sucks. Speaking of bad tarmac, there’s a slight whole-grain coarseness to the Giulia’s damping in its sportiest setting, but click that little damper button on the drive mode selector and an icon marked “SOFT” appears in the gauges. At this point, you have a modern sports sedan that’s nearly perfect. Agile, immediate, intuitive, a ballet dancer that breathes with the road. Forget aloof, the Giulia feels alive, talking to you through body motions while maintaining a balance as neutral as Switzerland.

Mind you, there are two things worth keeping in mind. The first is that you can’t turn off stability control, which means if you’re stuck in the snow, good luck. The second is that the brake pedal’s still a little weird. It’s a brake-by-wire system with what feels like a sharp bleed in pressure as you come to a stop, so you’ll have to fight muscle memory and not ease up on the binders. Still, learn to live with those quirks, and the Alfa Romeo Giulia feels alive. More alive than anything else in its segment. It feels like it has a pulse and a soul, that it hasn’t been J.D. Power’d to death, and it just makes you want to go for a drive. When we’re talking sports sedans, that should be the be-all and end-all, the bottom line, the singular thing these cars need to be brilliant at more than anything else. Well, mission accomplished.

Does It Have The Electronic Crap I Want?

The flipside to the Giulia’s age? Some of its tech just isn’t very 2025. The native infotainment system has a clear menu structure but is hilariously slow, like it’s imbibed a fifth of limoncello after a hard day’s work. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto only work over wired connections, the traffic sign recognition system frequently got speed limits wrong, and the Harman/Kardon system is pretty mid. There’s little distortion, sure, but it’s lacking dynamic range compared to the premium audio systems available in the BMW 3 Series and Mercedes-Benz C-Class, not to mention the Genesis G70 and Lexus IS.

Unless you’re the sort of person who wants a Jumbotron in your dashboard, however, none of the aged tech here is a huge issue because it all just fades into the background. The screen is small and low, there are real buttons and knobs for just about everything, and even the digital gauge cluster lets you focus on just driving the car.

Three Things To Know About The 2025 Alfa Romeo Giulia

1. Giant metal column-mounted paddle shifters are just as cool to use as you think.
2. You can’t disable stability control. Sorry, autocrossers.
3. No wireless CarPlay or Android Auto here, only wired.

Does The 2025 Alfa Romeo Giulia Fulfil Its Purpose?

Yes, all these years later, the Alfa Romeo Giulia is still the sports sedan enthusiast’s sports sedan. Even with an engine that offers all the character of a Xerox machine, it’s so full of charm and feedback and suspension mastery that you simply won’t want to stop driving it. That being said, if prices had stayed more or less where they were in 2017, there’s a chance the Giulia would be more successful. Right now, a new one costs as much as a BMW 330i, and this loaded Intensa trim is within $5,000 of a Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing. Ouch.

Really, the closest competition is a used Giulia because pre-facelift cars aren’t massively different from new ones and are second-hand bargains. Really cheap early examples can be had for less than $10,000, and you can get into a recent, low-mileage example for around $30,000. That’s a lot of car for the money, and considering Alfa Romeo is an enthusiast brand in North America, it’s not surprising that new sales volumes are low. Still, someone has to buy new Giulias, and if you want a warranty, this is one of the best-driving four-cylinder sports sedans out there.

What’s The Punctum Of The 2025 Alfa Romeo Giulia?

After all these years, the Alfa Romeo Giulia will still capture your heart.

Top graphic image: Thomas Hundal