Alexandre
Tonale arrives in the USA! And that's no mean feat! The Italian brand Alfa Romeo is counting on this market to boost its sales. mixed sales for the first half of 2023. But will he win the hearts of Americans?
As a reminder, the United States is Alfa Romeo's second-largest market. The Alfa Romeo Giulia and Stelvio sell well there, because they are sporty models and there are many Italian car enthusiasts. And let's not forget that in the USA, models are not taxed as much as in Europe because of CO2... that helps!
Selling Tonale in North America may therefore seem like a good idea.to take sales of the model up another notch. But there are two small details that could derail the story...
The first is that the Tonale is a small SUV. One might think that this is a segment that is not really buoyant in the USA.. However, on a national scale, this represents 3 million units sold in 2022, with the Toyota RAV4, Honda CR-V and Chevrolet Equinox in the top 3. The Jeep Compass, the Tonale's technical cousin, sold around 80,000 units in 2022. Alfa Romeo might be delighted to sell so many Tonales in the USA... but Jeep is far more popular there.
The other detail is its very close cousin, the Dodge Hornet. A copy-paste of the Tonale. Except that the first with a 268 hp engine starts at 30,735 $ while the second with a 250 hp PHEV engine starts at 42,995 $... they're both assembled in Italy in the same factory... no comment!
Available to order from March 2023, the first Tonales arrived on the North American continent in May 2023. This leaves the whole of the second half of 2023 to see which of the two will gain the upper hand over the other.
The match is decided. Dodge will have the upper hand.
The dodge hornet has the same headlights as the Fiat tipo Cross.... No ?? The comma-shaped blinker or logo of a famous basketball brand 🤣🤣✅
It really devalues the model to have authorized such cloning, produced moreover in the Alfasud plant, just to comply with CAFE regulations at Dodge (in short they don't care about the vehicle), the top management should have vetoed it. At the very least, they should have invested in a special body.
Or else hand the baby over to Dodge right away, pull out and make a product on top of the Stelvio and Giulia that Maserati needs too, and stay with the same product quality as well as investing in an after-sales service and showroom worthy of Ferrari and seriously upgrading the Giulia every year and Stelvio and taking over the MX5 RF platform for an entry-level Duetto, but they wanted to be stubborn and now they're going to pay the price. For Dodge, this product is a good fit, given its interior quality, but not for Alfa.
They'd be better off sticking to limited editions for the time being and small series models, or even ON/OFF. Going downmarket won't work, because people don't expect that anymore.
Yet we regularly read messages here from customers who have nothing to replace their Giulietta and are sorry to have to leave for the competition... Even when I read that a Lancia Delta is only scheduled for 2028, I wonder what's going on in the heads of the management! Alfa Romeo has always offered relatively affordable models in its range, it's never been a luxury brand like Maserati, so why refuse to compete with BMW who explicitly drew inspiration from it when they rebuilt their range in the 1960s? Where's the Giulietta of the 2020s? As for Mr. Imparato, who swore he understood the brand well, all the testers complained that the steering lacked consistency on the road, and we have a model that comes out with 130 hp front-wheel drive and a substantial weight (equivalent to a Giulia), which leads to totally unremarkable performance. I'd have gone straight for a compact 4.40m rear-wheel drive hatchback, 200 to 300 kilos lighter, with a small battery to help with acceleration and a slightly more refined sound. Without any competition, it would have pleased a lot of people.
Fredo was turned into a mass-produced brand by the Italian state, which was unable to give way to an independent administration that managed the brand and never followed up the product or pushed manufacturing quality as hard as it did research. By the 60s, the brand was in the high-end sports segment.
As for your wish, I'd like the same with a real Alfa 4-cylinder worked like Honda does with the K20 and K24.
That was 63 years ago. All the brand's 1950s customers are dead... I was indeed thinking of the latest Civic, which is remarkably pleasant to drive.
As a reminder, the 1954 Giulietta had a 1.3L four-cylinder and made 80 horsepower...
Those from the 60's and 70's and 80's are also in museums.😁😂
A brand can evolve, but not change its DNA. Look at how customers deserted us after the end of the 75 (me first), because it's hard to go from such a well-designed car (a concept later taken up by Porsche and Maserati) to a simple compact sedan that had 2 monsters (V6 and Turbo) and then move on to tractions, when the first solution would have been to evolve the 75 like Ferrari totally changed the Quattroporte 4.
It wasn't the 155, 156 or 159 that did it, but the latest Giulia, released 20 years too late.
I don't understand why, since the Fiat takeover, Alfa has focused solely on 6-cylinders, when the Balbiero was as legendary as the Busso. A 2.0 and 200hp atmo should have been released a long time ago, and a 2.0 and 2.5 Turbo for the Giulia should have been offered between 300 and 400hp rising to 7,000 RPM to justify its price.
200 and 280hp are good for Abarth, but not for Alfa. Already the Giulietta QV version between 250 and 350hp should have come out at the time in 4WD and made a clone of the Delta and cloned the Giulia to make a Thema.
The 75 had more customers than the 155, 156 and 159.
Even the SZ created on the same chassis is more sensational today than a GTV, GT or Brera with less hp.
The GT could have been just as sensational with the same rear-wheel drive system as the Sportwagon or Crosswagon (80% rear-wheel drive), just like the 156 and 147, which would have been a real hit on the market and a real renaissance for the group (because Lancia would have benefited from it).
They won back a few customers at the time, but then they made the same mistake again with the 159 and lost all their hard-won customers (they won over fickle customers looking for a beautiful but bland car), while the Giulietta was magnificent but abandoned, even though we were promised upgrades every year, as was the case with Japanese cars at the time.
Cheap compacts have been available from Alfa since the 70s, but why? Because the Italian state didn't put a penny into developing the brand. Without that, I don't think Alfa would have gone downmarket either, like the Mito and Tonale.
Hello,
The Alfa Romeo Tonale PHEV doesn't make 250 hp in the USA, but 285 hp, compared with 280 hp in Europe, while Mexico and Canada are entitled to the 268 hp petrol version identical to the Dodge Hornet.
No trace of this supposed 250 hp PHEV version on the Alfa Romeo USA website, unless it's a typo when writing the article.
Thank you for all your hard work.