LIKES
- Sensuous curves
- Sharp moves
- Willing power
- Quadrifoglio track star
- Super-quick steering
DISLIKES
- Quick steering can be tedious on the highway
- Only fair rear seat space
- Lacks a manual transmission
- Wooden brake feel
BUYING TIP
A sport sedan with Italian good looks, the 2022 Alfa Romeo Giulia boasts sharp moves and plentiful power.
What kind of car is the 2022 Alfa Romeo Giulia? What does it compare to?
The 2022 Alfa Romeo Giulia brings Italian flair, turbocharged power, and joyful performance to the compact sport sedan class. It takes on accomplished rivals like the Audi A4, BMW 3-Series, Mercedes-Benz C-Class, and Volvo S60.
Is the 2022 Alfa Romeo Giulia a good car?
The Giulia’s looks, power, handling, and loaded feature set contribute to a TCC Rating of 6.8 out of 10 TCC Rating.
What's new for the 2022 Alfa Romeo Giulia?
Alfa Romeo replaces the Giulia Ti Sport model with a model called Veloce this year, and adds several more standard convenience and safety features. Veloce joins Sprint, Ti, and Quadrifoglio models.
Among a fun group of sport sedans, the Giulia distinguishes itself with its svelte Italian suit. It sports a triangular grille that serves as the starting point for a series of rounded forms. It has traditional sporty lines, too, thanks to a long hood, short deck, and low stance. The rounded lines continue inside, and so do the sporty elements, which include sport seats, aluminum pedals, and a small-diameter steering wheel. An 8.8-inch touchscreen provides infotainment.
The front seats offer good support, and the rear seat has decent space for two adults. The trunk is on the small side.
Performance is the Giulia’s calling card. The Giulia offers a 280-hp 2.0-liter turbo-4 or the Quadrifoglio’s 505-hp twin-turbo 2.9-liter V-6 borrowed from Ferrari. Even the base engine makes the car quick, with a 0-60 mph time of 5.1 seconds, but the V-6 unlocks a 3.8-second 0-60 mph time and a 191-mph top speed. Fuel economy is decent with the turbo-4 at 27 mpg combined, and the V-6 is predictably thirsty at 20 mpg combined.
The dynamic highlight is a super quick 11.8:1 steering ratio that works with a stiff platform to trigger immediate responses. While the brakes are strong, they offer very little feel.
How much does the 2022 Alfa Romeo Giulia cost?
The Giulia Sprint starts at $44,445 and the Quadrifoglio starts at $80,755. The Sprint is well appointed with leather upholstery, power leather front seats, 10-way power-adjustable front seats with 4-way lumbar adjustments, heated front and rear seats, ambient interior lighting, wireless smartphone charging, an 8.8-inch touchscreen, navigation, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, satellite radio, Brembo brakes, and 17-inch alloy wheels.
The Giulia has incomplete crash-test scores, but the new safety equipment teams with automatic emergency braking and adaptive cruise control to give the car a full safety feature set.
In Italy.
Styling
Low, sleek, and curvy the Alfa Romeo Giulia brings Italian style to the sport sedan segment.
Is the Alfa Romeo Giulia a good-looking car?
The Giulia is downright pretty with its rounded curves, bold triangular grille, and serious stance. We think the exterior is exceptional and that teams with a sporty cabin to earn the Giulia an 8 here.
Between its “scudetto,” or shield grille and rounded lines, the Giulia looks like nothing else in the class. The grille is the central part of a face that includes large, wide lower air intakes and horizontal cat’s-eye headlights. The car’s sensuous curves emerge from the grille with subtle, rounded character lines on the hood and flanks, and resolve at the rear in a rounded, kick-up spoiler over horizontal taillights. Available wheels with five rounded spokes play off both rounded lines and the Quadrifoglio’s four-leaf clover logo.
The body also has sporty lines, with a low stance, a long hood, a set-back cabin, and a short deck.
The exterior theme extends inside with rounded dash lines and door inserts, and circular gauges and vents. Sporty elements include three versions of sport buckets, a small-diameter steering wheel, and aluminum pedals. The design is driver-focused, too, with the dash controls and 8.8-inch center screen tilted toward the driver.
Performance
The 2022 Alfa Romeo Giulia boasts sport sedan agility and can be outfitted as a high-performance track machine.
The Giulia has plentiful turbocharged power and exceptional handling highlighted by quick steering to earn it an 8 for performance.
Is the Alfa Romeo Giulia AWD?
The high-performance Quadrifoglio comes only with rear-wheel drive, and the other models offer optional all-wheel drive.
It’s quick with its base turbo-4 and lightning fast with its twin-turbo V-6.
The base 2.0-liter turbo-4 makes 280 hp and 306 lb-ft of torque, which vaults the Giulia from 0-60 mph in just 5.1 seconds. It has good power both down low and at highway speeds, and it’s always delivered smoothly.
The Quadrifoglio’s twin-turbo 2.9-liter V-6 ups the output to 505 hp and 443 lb-ft of torque, which rockets the car from 0-60 mph in 3.8 seconds and pushes it all the way to 191 mph. A Ferrari powerplant, the V-6’s max torque arrives at a relatively high 2,500 rpm, which can prompt drivers to dig deeper into the throttle to feel the thrill of the ever-building power. The wicked sound when pushed can have the same effect.
Drivers can feel that the Giulia is special with the first turn of the steering wheel. An ultra-quick 11.8:1 ratio conspires with a stiff platform, a double-wishbone front suspension, and perfect 50/50 weight balance to yield quick turn-in reactions, amazing agility, and mostly flat cornering. That all gets amped up with the Quadrifoglio’s performance-tuned suspension, which is the only model that may ride too firmly for some drivers.
The Giulia’s only dynamic flaw is the brake-by-wire system, which has a wooden feel despite strong stopping power from the standard Brembo brakes.
Comfort & Quality
The Giulia offers a series of supportive front seats, and it can carry four occupants as long as they’re not too big.
The 2022 Alfa Romeo Giulia comes with sporty, supportive front seats, and while it can carry four and has decent interior materials, those traits don’t rise above the class average. We rate it a 6 here for those front seats.
Alfa offers three levels of front sport seats for the Giulia. They start out well bolstered and gain support from there, and they have plenty of power adjustments to tailor a comfortable seating position. The leather- and Alcantara-wrapped Sparco seats for the Quadrifoglio can be too tight for wider drivers, but the rest are quite accommodating.
The second row has a decent 35.4 inches of leg room and 37.6 inches of head room, but small door openings make it difficult to slide in.
Every Giulia gets standard leather upholstery, and plastic, wood, aluminum, or carbon-fiber trim based on the chosen model. The materials are appropriate for the Giulia’s luxury-car positioning, but they don’t stand out in a class that offers several wonderfully appointed cockpits.
Safety
Alfa Romeo loads up the Giulia with standard safety features to go with good IIHS crash-test scores.
How safe is the Alfa Romeo Giulia?
While it has good crash scores from the IIHS and lots of safety features, we’ll wait to rate the Giulia until the NHTSA crash tests it.
The Giulia gets top “Good” ratings in all IIHS crash tests and for its headlights, and a top “Superior” rating for its forward collision mitigation system, but it hasn’t been subjected to the new tougher side crash test, so it doesn’t earn a Top Safety Pick award.
Features
The 2022 Alfa Romeo Giulia comes loaded with equipment and offers a variety of options.
With the changes for 2022, the Giulia is very well equipped. That teams with a wide range of options to earn the Giulia a 7 out of 10 here.
Which Alfa Romeo Giulia should I buy?
The Veloce model has much of the sinister look of the Quadrifoglio and some important performance equipment that fits with the sport sedan mission. For $50,185, the Veloce gets sport seats with 14-way adjustments for the driver and 12-way for the front passenger, a heated steering wheel, a sunroof, aluminum interior trim, a mechanical limited-slip differential, and 19-inch wheels.
The Giulia Quadrifoglio tops the line as a performance beast. It runs $80,755 and comes standard with carbon-fiber interior trim, front performance seats with Alcantara inserts, extended leather upholstery, a 14-speaker Harman Kardon audio system, a carbon-fiber front splitter, a rear diffuser, a carbon-fiber hood and roof, a carbon-fiber rear spoiler, adaptive dampers, larger Brembo brakes, an electric torque-vectoring rear differential, a two-mode performance exhaust system, and summer performance tires.
Giulia infotainment
The Giulia got a new infotainment system for 2021, with an 8.8-inch touchscreen, to join a center console rotary dial and voice commands. It’s easier to use than the awkward initial system, but systems from other automakers are more straightforward and have more functionality.
Fuel Economy
The 2022 Alfa Romeo Giulia is fairly efficient considering its power.
Is the Alfa Romeo Giulia good on gas?
The base turbo-4, which accounts for the majority of the sales, offers decent fuel economy. We rate the Giulia a 5 here for the turbo-4’s 24 mpg city, 33 highway, 27 combined EPA ratings with rear-wheel drive.
Add all-wheel drive, and the turbo-4 Giulia drops slightly to 23/31/26 mpg.
Required premium fuel adds to the cost of owning every Giulia.
What a good looking car. It's like a dream car. Thank you so much for the review.
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