Alfa Romeo VS BMW

Alfa Romeo Automobiles S.P.A is a car manufacturer, founded by Frenchman Alexandre Darracq as A.L.F.A. on 24 June 1910, in Milan. The brand is known for sporty vehicles and has been involved in car racing since 1911.
The company was owned by Italian state holding company Istituto per la RicostruzioneIndustriale between 1932 and 1986, when it became a part of the Fiat group. In February 2007, the Alfa Romeo brand became Alfa Romeo Automobiles S.P.A., a subsidiary of Fiat Group Automobiles, now Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Italy.

Alfa Romeo has competed successfully in Grand Prix motor racing, Formula One, sportscar racing, touring car racing, and rallies. It has competed both as a constructor and an engine supplier, via works entries (usually under the name Alfa Corse or Autodelta), and private entries. The first racing car was made in 1913, three years after the foundation of the company, and Alfa Romeo won the inaugural world championship for Grand Prix cars in 1925. The race victories gave a sporty image to the marque, and Enzo Ferrari founded the Scuderia Ferrari racing team in 1929 as an Alfa Romeo racing team, before becoming independent in 1939. It has had the most wins of any marquee in the world.

BMW (Bavarian Motor Works) is a German multinational company which currently produces automobiles and motorcycles, and also produced aircraft engines until 1945.
The company was founded in 1916 and has its headquarters in Munich, Bavaria. BMW produces motor vehicles in Germany, Brazil, China, India, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. In 2015, BMW was the world's 12th largest producer of motor vehicles, with 2,279,503 vehicles produced. The Quandt family are long-term shareholders of the company, with the remaining stocks owned by public float.
Automobiles are marketed under the brands BMW (with sub-brands BMW M for performance models and BMW i for plug-in electric cars), Mini and Rolls-Royce. Motorcycles are marketed under the brand BMW Motorrad.
The company has significant motorsport history, especially in touring cars, Formula 1, sports cars and the Isle of Man TT.

The introduction of the Alfa Romeo Giulia as a BMW challenger is a claim that historically has meant that it will not be as good as a BMW. Mercedes, Audi, Lexus, Infiniti, Cadillac, and a few others have tried to loosen BMW's grip on the sports sedan market with little success.

It was BMW that was doing the copying when in the early sixties they looked to Alfa Romeo's sport sedans for inspiration. Alfa Romeo's pre-war racing pedigree was second to none, and series production Alfas were sporting twin cam engines, and fuel injection years before BMW. What the post-war Alfa cars did not offer was reliability and a North American dealer network that knew how to service or sell their products. Consequently in 1995 Alfa abandoned the US market.

Now it is the Alfa Giulia taking aim at the BMW 3-series. The Fiat/Chrysler group has a lot of resources (think Ferrari), and the engineering chops to beat BMW at its own game, but it will take a long time to build a reliable dealer network, not to mention the quality issues that have dogged them for decades.
Alfa will follow what has become a familiar recipe to challenge the 3-series. With 3 sets of trim available, the most affordable model, the Giulia, and further upscale, Giulia ti, both with a turbocharged 4-banger and 276 HP compares favorably with the BMW 328i and the Audi A4. The 505 HP Giulia flagship is shooting for the M4/3. Good luck with that, Alfa. A delayed introduction hints of troubles to come.

Alfa has to avoid joining the automotive graveyard of models that have tried to attain BMW's status. Just to be cruel I will mention the Cadillac Cimarron. If you are too young to remember, it was the cheapest Chevy front wheel drive platform with a Cadillac badge. Panned by both GM management and the automotive press, it was a spectacular flop. I hope that the executives of the Fiat/Chrysler group remember it well. We do not need a Fiat in a stylish suit.

If Alfa is going to revive a long dormant marquee, it is going to have to step up and take advantage of what perhaps BMW is losing sight of; outstanding suspension tuning, communicative steering, reliability, and a dealer network that believes in the product. And, oh yeah, a Ferrari massaged engine.

It takes more than copying a winning formula, to build a winner. The market is full of copycats, we need an Alfa that dazzles.

Worthy of note is the fact that the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio seems to fit that profile.

Recently topgear.com (Top Gear) did The Top Gear twin test: 503bhp Giulia Quadrifoglio takes on 444bhp M4 Competition Pack

A battle royale, a slug fest, a proper ding-dong, you can call it what you like, but this is the face-off we all want to see: Alfa Romeo Giulia QV versus BMW M4.

This M4 has a Competition Pack to try and narrow the gap in power and price to the more potent, more expensive Giulia. The Competition Pack uses the same 3.0-litre twin-turbo straight six, but now produces 444bhp instead of 425bhp. As a result the 0-60mph time has fallen by 0.1secs, to four seconds exactly. Torque remains at a prodigious 405lb ft, available at just 1,850rpm.

The springs, dampers and anti-roll bars are all-new both front and rear, and the driving modes on the adaptive suspension have been reconfigured, on top of that, the rear differential settings have been changed. So now instead of trying to splay sideways when you accelerate out of a corner, the M3 just hooks up and drives. It’s not only faster and more engaging, but has considerably reduced the fear factor.

The cash in your wallet might well sort out the difference in price between this and the £61,000 Giulia Quadrifoglio. Separated by £35 they might be, but the Italian still has healthy 59bhp and 37lb ft advantages and is some 48kg lighter. The chassis is aluminium and steel, there’s double wishbone front and multi-link rear suspension, and the torque is divided up by a vectoring diff able to send 100 percent of thrust to either wheel.

Ahead of the carbon prop shaft sits ZF’s eight-speed automatic, standard in the UK (some markets offer a six-speed manual, but it’s no great shakes, so rest easy British buyers – the auto is better) and shoving the whole thing along is a 2.9-litre twin turbo V6 ‘inspired by Ferrari expertise and technologies’, which also happens to share bore and stroke measurements with the eight cylinder Ferrari California T motor. The Alfa sports 10mm-narrower 245/35 front and 10mm wider 285/30 rear tyres on 19-inch wheels.

Let’s start inside. This makes sense because one thing serves to characterise each car – the steering wheel. The BMW’s is fat: thick-rimmed and squidgy. The Alfa’s is firmer, more slender. Now it’s possible that personal preference plays a role here, but if you like the BMW’s better, you’re wrong. The M4’s makes the car feel clumsy and hard to get hold of, while the Alfa’s implies delicacy.

Both have good driving positions – seats that can be tilted to cup your thighs and steering wheels that pull a long way out of the dash; The full touring car. The Giulia is more simply laid out inside – Alfa hasn’t tried to pack too much functionality into the infotainment or added too much data into the dashboard.

So revs and speed are easy to read and you can find your way between navigation destinations and radio stations without too much raff. Until you want to zoom into the map. Then things get trickier.

The BMW is better organized in terms of information hierarchy and accessing it, but the area where it really pulls out a lead is, inevitably, build and material quality. It feels like everything you’d hope a £60,000 car would. The Alfa doesn’t.

You can overlook most of the Alfa’s trim and plastic issues because they’re not too intrusive, but the gearlever and central screen control wheel really deserve to be better. They look fine, but the actions of both are cheap and there’s play in them which shouldn’t be there.

I’m going to ignore practicality. You can get people in the back and luggage in the boot of each. Enough for four of you to go away for a weekend, but there’s not much dignity involved with posting yourself into or out of the M4s back seats, so have the M3 if that’s your thing. Personally I think the four-door BMW looks better, too. Bigger arch blisters…

So, the driving. The Alfa feels notably faster. I know the figures suggest it should (330bhp/tonne plays 282), but BMW has always provided extremely healthy horsepower and I hadn’t really been expecting to be able to detect much of a difference in the way these 3.0-litre twin turbo motors picks up, but you really, really can.

The BMW is so muscular low down; it drips torque and delivers it with a deliciously deep, rorty note. But it never builds enough from there. It’s just colossally fast wherever you go in the rev range. Although the engine note varies a little, there’s not enough of an improvement in noise or acceleration to make it necessary to venture beyond 5,500rpm.

I kept on being disappointed the Alfa wouldn’t go beyond 6,800rpm. It would be nice if it revved a bit higher, but to be fair, it’s already dispatched the BMW in a straight line. It needs more revs to really wake up, but once past 3,000rpm it forces itself harder down the road than the M4.

In a straight line, then, the Alfa feels more urgent and brighter, hits harder and faster as long as you’ve got some revs on the dial, and sounds better, too. There’s a downside to this though.

In the BMW you have complete control over all the settings for engine, suspension, steering and gearbox. There are buttons on the centre console and you can have them wherever you like. In the Alfa there’s a DNA mode dial – you twist it where you like (All-weather, Normal, Dynamic, Race) and the car configures itself to suit. However, the sport exhaust is only activated in Race, and in Race the traction control is turned off, as in totally disabled.

But you want the sports exhaust all the time, because it sounds great. So you find yourself at traffic lights being concerned about possible massive wheel spin and at roundabouts about possible barrier interface just because you want to listen to the V6 sing.

As I mentioned earlier, the Competition Pack M4 is a much more cohesive, together car than the regular M4. It brings more feel and control to the back axle so you can manage it better on the way out of corners. Personally I always enjoyed the challenge of the standard car, but I’m happy to admit that the Competition loses nothing and gains considerably.

The M4 is a really good car in isolation – grippy, well balanced, predictable. It’s got great turn-in grip, there’s little roll, it delivers plentiful speed and as we’ve found in the past, it’s a sharper handling, more satisfying car than a Mercedes-AMG C63, but alongside the Alfa it feels rather blunt and inert.

Just going back to the handling, you have to ask how much of the Giulia’s ability is down to the tyres, which are notably more aggressive than the Michelin Pilot Super Sports worn by the BMW. But even wearing identical rubber I’m certain the Alfa would feel the more alert, sweeter and controllable car. All the systems; steering, back axle, differential, chassis, engine power delivery feel better integrated and amalgamated. It’s a purer, simpler and more satisfying car to drive.

One note here, all these impressions relate to road driving. On track, the more tautly suspended BMW does stage a slight fight back, a place where its on-limit chassis balance really starts to come alive. But it still never flows as happily as the Alfa, isn’t as playful or forgiving in a tight spot. It’s a moodier, darker car.

Is there any dynamic area where the BMW has the edge? Well, it definitely has the more positive brake. They’re firmer underfoot from the word go, while the Alfa’s need some heat in them before they start working properly. And of course there has to be some residual concern about how well built the Alfa is, and how it’ll last.

Fundamentally this is a better car than the BMW M4, more hedonistic, more exciting, more rewarding, faster, better balanced and brighter. In other words, fully deserving of all the praise heaped on it.

BUT WHICH IS A BATTER MODEL?

Although the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio is said to be better than the BMW M3/4, the BMW still remains a better model than Alfa Romeo in all ramifications; sales, quality, sporty, functionality, beauty, performance, maintenance, durability, rugged, beast, availability.

For Nigerians your best bet is BMW. Although Alfa Romeo sounds interesting from the astounding review given by topgear.com, bear in mind that that’s just one product. BMW has shown time without number for a couple years that they a force to be reckoned with, true German engineering, unlike Alfa Romeo that has always shown signs of disability.

DRIVE A BMW TODAY.