1992 Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce on 2040-cars

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Stellantis earnings rise along with EV sales

AMSTERDAM — Automaker Stellantis on Wednesday reported its earnings grew in 2022 from a year earlier and said its push into electric vehicles led to a jump in sales even as it faces growing competition from an industrywide shift to more climate-friendly offerings. Stellantis, formed in 2021 from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and FranceÂ’s PSA Peugeot, said net revenue of 179.6 billion euros ($191 billion) was up 18% from 2021, citing strong pricing and its mix of vehicles. It reported net profit of 16.8 billion euros, up 26% from 2021. Stellantis plans to convert all of its European sales and half of its U.S. sales to battery-electric vehicles by 2030. It said the strategy led to a 41% increase in battery EV sales in 2022, to 288,000 vehicles, compared with the year earlier. The company has “demonstrated the effectiveness of our electrification strategy in Europe,” CEO Carlos Tavares said in a statement. “We now have the technology, the products, the raw materials and the full battery ecosystem to lead that same transformative journey in North America, starting with our first fully electric Ram vehicles from 2023 and Jeep from 2024.” The automaker is competing in an increasingly crowded field for a share of the electric vehicle market. Companies are scrambling to roll out environmentally friendly models as they look to hit goals of cutting climate-changing emissions, driven by government pressure. The transformation has gotten a boost from a U.S. law that is rolling out big subsidies for clean technology like EVs but has European governments calling out the harm that they say the funding poses to homegrown industry across the Atlantic. Stellantis' Jeep brand will start selling two fully electric SUVs in North America and another one in Europe over the next two years. It says its Ram brand will roll out an electric pickup truck this year, joining a rush of EV competitors looking to claim a piece of the full-size truck market. The company plans to bring 25 battery-electric models to the U.S. by 2030. As part of that push, it has said it would build two EV battery factories in North America. A $2.5 billion joint venture with Samsung will bring one of those facilities to Indiana, which is expected to employ up to 1,400 workers. The other factory will be in Windsor, Ontario, a collaboration with South KoreaÂ’s LG Energy Solution that aims to create about 2,500 jobs. The EV push comes amid a slowdown in U.S.

Alfa Romeo Milano revealed as brand's first full EV offering

Alfa Romeo has made it clear it's going to fully electric models over the next few years, and that seems to be starting with the newly revealed Milano. It's a subcompact SUV, and while it seems that it will be offered with an internal combustion engine (similar to its platform-mate, the Jeep Avenger), Alfa has only talked about the EV powertrains to start with. And at least one of them sounds quite entertaining. Styling-wise, there's no mistaking the Milano for anything but an Alfa. It's very curvy, and has the prominent inverted triangle grille that's the brand's signature. It adopts some boomerang-shaped headlights that blend into additional air inlets on either side of the grille. That inverted triangle grille can feature different patterns, such as the mesh with classic "Alfa Romeo" script shown on the blue example, or the zoomed-in Alfa shield pattern shown on the red one. The tail features a wide rear that attempts to ape the "kamm tail" of the Alfa Romeo TZ sports car. We're not sure how successful it is at that, but it still looks solid. The Milano is fairly small. It comes in at just over 164 inches long and 70 inches wide, or around the size of a Kia Soul. It's also about 2 inches shorter in length than a Jeep Renegade, but that also makes it about 4 inches longer than the diminutive Jeep Avenger.  The interior is pretty typical Alfa, too. The 10.25-inch instrument screen is housed in a double-barrel shroud, and the 10.25-inch infotainment screen is mounted a little lower and canted toward the driver in the center stack. Round air vents bookend the dashboard. Powertrain details aren't complete, but the basics are there. The standard versions will get a 156-horsepower single motor at the front, while the Veloce gets a 240-horsepower single front motor. Both get a 54-kWh battery pack. On the WLTP cycle, the 156-horsepower version gets 250 miles of range. That would undoubtedly be lower on the EPA cycle if the car were to be offered here. And while there's no number for the Veloce, you can also count on that being lower than the standard model. The Veloce doesn't just get more power, though. It sits an inch lower on 20-inch wheels, and it gets stiffer front and rear anti-roll bars. The front brakes are upgraded to four-piston calipers with larger 15-inch rotors. Capping everything off is a Torsen limited-slip differential. It sounds like an awful lot of fun (and also sounds a bit like the setup for the Fiat 600e Abarth).

6 luxury car brands to watch in 2024

2023 was a healthy year for the auto industry, and even with incentives returning and dealer lots filling up, there's plenty to like about the market if you build luxury automobiles, and we expect 2024 to be more of the same, which makes luxury-segment rivalries all the more interesting. Top luxury car brand rivalries? Well, that sounds downright uncivilized. But we know better, don't we? And when every quarterly sales update is an opportunity to remind somebody else that they bought the wrong status symbol, well, who can resist? Certainly not the diehard customers who fly their favorite brands' banners high.  Read more: Auto sales: Industry records best year since 2019 Read more: 2023 auto sales and 2024 preview: Ford Bronco vs. Jeep Wrangler This is a tricky segment to define, but essentially, we're looking at luxury car brands with depth to their portfolios and dealerships that exist to attract real-world customers. The Bentleys, Rolls-Royces and McLarens of the world are luxury cars, certainly, but we're more concerned with brands that have a bit more mass appeal — manufacturers who treat supply constraints as fiascos rather than features. If you disagree with our selections, feel free to let us know in the comments.  And since we're mostly concerned with finishing order, the luxury brands and totals featured here may change as new data come in throughout 2024. Due to the wild swings of the past several years, we're treating 2023 as the baseline by which we'll measure sales performance. And rather than rank brands vs. their finishing order in 2022, when supply-chain and inflationary issues still played havoc with sales figures, we're starting 2024 off with a clean slate.  The mainstream luxury segment is always a dogfight, but with their varied approaches to electrification all of the major luxury brands are in the midst of reshaping the premium landscape. Who is doing it right? Well, according to U.S. shoppers, the usual suspects are up to their old tricks.