1972 Alfa Romeo Spider 2 Liter Fuel Injection on 2040-cars

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Alfa Romeo Giulia gets top safety award from IIHS

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has awarded a Top Safety Pick+ rating, its highest award, to the 2017 Alfa Romeo Giulia midsize luxury sedan — but with a caveat. The Giulia must have been built after May of this year, when the car's front-end structure was improved and the door hinge pillar and door sill were reinforced, among other changes. Vehicles that earn the IIHS's Top Safety Pick+ must achieve good ratings in all five crash tests — small overlap front, moderate overlap front, side, roof strength and head restraints — an advanced or superior rating in front crash prevention and and acceptable or good rating for headlights. The Giulia's optional front crash prevention system earned a superior rating after it avoided a crash in the 12 mph track test and reduced its impact speed by an average 24 mph in the 25 mph test. The car's optional curve-adaptive headlights earned a good rating, while the base headlights rated poor. It joins 2017 versions of the Lexus ES 350, Audi A3 and A4, Volvo S60 and V60, and BMW 2 series and 3 series, as Top Safety Pick+ awardees for its segment. You can read our First Drive review of the Giulia here. Featured Gallery 2017 Alfa Romeo Giulia Ti Lusso View 26 Photos Alfa Romeo Luxury Sedan crash test alfa romeo giulia

2018 Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio vs. 2018 Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk: On-paper sibling rivalry

Pricing was revealed for the 2018 Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio, and with its $81,590 price tag, it's within range of yet another high-performance SUV from Fiat-Chrysler: the 2018 Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk. The Hellcat-powered Jeep is more expensive than the Stelvio at $86,995, but depending on options, the price advantage might go either way. This left us wondering, how similar are these two high-powered SUVs? Besides sharing the same number of words in their very-long names, we took a look at some of their performance specs and put them in the spreadsheet below. As always, if you want to compare either of these with other speedy SUVs, be sure to try out our comparison tools. As far as outright speed, both SUVs are surprisingly close. The Trackhawk is just a bit quicker in a straight line, hitting 60 mph in just 3.5 seconds as opposed to the Alfa's 3.9. The Jeep's 180-mph top speed is also 3-mph quicker than the Alfa. But neither of these differences is especially huge. What makes this interesting is how different the paths each SUV takes to get to its results. The Trackhawk accomplishes the task with pure grunt. It has Dodge's Hellcat supercharged 6.2-liter V8 making 707 horsepower and 645 pound-feet of torque to overcome its hefty 5,363-pound body. The Alfa, on the other hand, makes do with less power and torque, 505 and 443, respectively, from its twin-turbocharged 2.9-liter V6. It has less weight, though. Exactly how much less we're not sure, since Alfa hasn't revealed that number, but a regular Stelvio weighs right around 4,000 pounds, so we would guess the weight is similar, possibly a little more. View 14 Photos The differences in how each SUV achieves its performance should result in pretty different driving characteristics, and probably different buyers. Each SUV's bragging points also indicates this. The Trackhawk boasts an impressive 11.6-second claimed quarter-mile time, something that American muscle car fans everywhere care about. The Alfa brags about how it's the fastest production SUV to lap the Nurburgring, something sure to impress fans of foreign cars and those that value handling over straight-line performance. So really, although these two SUVs have performance similarities, they're also very different, and the right one for you depends on what you value. View 29 Photos Also, as an afterthought, we wonder if the guys that attempted a Viper record at the 'Ring would be up for trying to break the Alfa time with the Jeep.

2015 Alfa Romeo 4C First Drive [w/video]

The dissonance between first look and first wheel turn was jarring. Alfa Romeo had chosen a suitably hip venue in which to showcase the coupe that will mark the brand's honest-to-God return to the US market - a graffiti-festooned warehouse housing a boutique furniture company in San Francisco's Mission District. The curvilinear sports car proved a lovely stylistic counterpoint to its concrete and metal backdrop while feeling perfectly synced with the eye-watering square-footage prices of the environs. Where the young, rich, beautiful people gather, the 2015 Alfa Romeo 4C will be a star. And wherever they drive, expect things to get pretty loud. No sooner had I doubled over, dropped into the driver's seat, and fired to life the Alfa's utterly raucous little 1.7-liter engine, did the 'symphony' of the 4C begin. An introductory note of an inevitable chin scrape as I pulled out of the hipster parking lot and into the street was quickly followed by the uncivilized racket of the engine warming up, with only wafer-thin glass to filter the hubbub just behind my head. At a cold idle, the sound isn't unlike what I'd imagine it would be like to live inside of a Volkswagen TDI engine bay. Thankfully, as traffic cleared and The City's streets turned swiftly into undulating coastal roads, the experiential delta between heartthrob looks and project-car manners started to shrink. Unlike the last Alfas to be sold en masse on our shores, this is no beautiful boulevardier. What the 4C is, however, is hot hell's own driver's car. On public backroads, the Alfa is nothing short of a scalpel. Last year, newly minted Infiniti PR maestro (and former Autoblog European editor) Matt Davis had the cheek to call the 4C a "baby 458." That's an awfully powerful endorsement for a $55k featherweight rocking a mid-mounted turbo four, but the setting of the bar so high wasn't without just cause. Despite gaining a few hundred pounds worth of thicker carbon fiber, heavier US-spec airbags, standard AC and audio equipment and the like, the handsome Alfa coupe really does live up to its Italian sports car roots. With respect to the punchy engine, it's that carbon fiber tub that really sets the stage for this coupe to handle and perform so brilliantly. Added weight noted, let us pause for a moment to note that the 4C still tips the scales at an improbable 2,465 pounds.