Alfa Romeo Tonale review

Overview

What is it?

Alfa Romeo has a history of wilful neglect of the realities of the car market. The Tonale is far more pragmatic than most of what’s gone before. A car that’s not for dreamers, but for actual buyers: a compact-ish crossover of thoroughly moderate performance.

It has some talents that put it fair and square against some pretty firm opposition including the Audi Q3, BMW X1, Mercedes GLA and many more. But it wants to be sporty and our favourite cars in that category are the ones that lean more towards relaxation: the Evoque and Volvo XC40.

When it emerged as a concept car in 2019, the Tonale’s shape was widely liked. Commendably, not much has changed for production. It still has lush curves and Alfa motifs, among them the slim triple-barrel front and rear LEDs, and five-hole wheels. The elegant shield grille makes you wonder why rivals are making such a horlicks of their increasingly pugnacious frontal styling.

What’s under the skin?

The European petrol range is all hybrid. Alfa needed that – at the moment it’s constrained by having nothing electrified so its fleet CO2 average is too high. Now it says it will go from “zero to 0” by 2027. It’s not the best slogan because it needs explaining: ‘zero’ means it’s nowhere now, and ‘0’ stands for 0g/km because it’ll be all-electric by that date. The hybrids are the intermediate step.

The top Tonale has a plug, 271bhp and 4WD courtesy of an electrically driven rear axle. But it isn’t available for test yet. We’ll update when we’ve tried it.

The other is a front-driver, with a 160bhp 1.5-litre engine. It’s turbocharged (not a given with hybrids) and efficiency at light effort is improved by its ability to run in the Miller cycle (Google it). The hybrid system is the non-plug kind, with an electric motor built into a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission. Even though it’s just a 48V motor, it can get the car moving from rest, and make use of stored energy from regeneration or engine load-point mapping. That’s the practice, standard for full hybrids, where the engine is loaded up against the motor/generator at times when the wheels don’t need much torque. That way the engine runs in its most efficient regime while the battery gets to store energy for times the engine is off.

Does that happen a lot?

It does. In the WLTP test cycle the engine is silent for half the time – though obviously much less than half the distance.

Buried well underneath are some platform and suspension parts shared with the Jeep Compass. But Alfa has done a thorough re-work to turn it from an off-roader into a sharpish road crossover.

The Tonale is well up-to-date with its screens and connectivity. Find details of the driver-facing stuff under the ‘Interior’ tab. Then click to the ‘Buying’ tab for details on how this is the first car with its own non-fungible token, and what that means for resale values.

Is it enjoyable?

Our opinion of the Tonale veered wildly in our first hours with it. Click through to the ‘Driving’ section to see how the steering and engine/hybrid system both conspire to make smooth driving stupidly challenging at low speed.

But on motorways and open roads it feels more natural and sometimes quite fun. It certainly handles with a bit more zest than most rivals, even if that further undermines comfort and relaxation in 30mph zones.

In 160bhp form, the Tonale isn’t a quick or charismatic drive, but in the end you’ve got to adjust your expectations of what a £35k crossover can do. At least the hybrid system helps with urban economy.

There are annoyances to the low-speed driving, but to a degree you forgive it because it gets better as the road gets more interesting.

Its cabin beauty is more than skin-deep. It’s well-made and practical, and the electronics work properly.

Not a car we can recommend without reservation, but we liked it more the further we drove it. It’s less boring than many of the rivals.

Driving

What is it like to drive?

The Tonale engineers, in what seems to be an attempt to make it sporty and Alfa-like, took some strange decisions in setting it up. Result is it works well on fast fun roads. But on the usual family-crossover suburban driving duties, the Tonale is actually rather irritating.

Oh dear. How so?

Just off the straight ahead, the steering is ultra-direct and yet very light at low speed. Result is in tight urban situations it’s jittery, hard to place on the road, and generally tiring. Kerbed alloys and grazed wing mirrors ahoy.

Plus you’ll need a pretty forgiving attitude to the hybrid system. At low speed, it gets confused when you ask for gentle acceleration. Perhaps it’s deciding between boosting the engine by changing the variable-geometry turbo’s vanes, or switching from Miller cycle to normal combustion mode, or shifting down a gear, or calling on the hybrid electric motor. Whatever, by the time you’ve got going, some sharp-elbowed van driver has dodged into the gap ahead of you. Still, to be fair you’ll have to look at length to find any affordable hybrid or PHEV that has an entirely intuitive powertrain.

What if I’m driving in a more, er, Italian fashion?

Most hybrids get even less pleasant the harder you drive, but this Alfa is the opposite. Twist the mode selector into D-for-dynamic and take control with the big aluminium shift paddles and it all becomes more satisfying. There’s still sub-3,000rpm turbo lag but you can predict it. Don’t turn down the stereo: the 1.5-litre engine sounds inoffensive but not as inspiring as Alfa fours of old.

By the same token the chassis gets better if you press on. It’s a tallish car that takes 8.8 seconds to get from 0-62mph, so don’t expect it to act like a hot hatch. But the steering gains weight at out-of-town speed, and its quickness is backed up by accuracy and a decent resistance to understeer. There’s little slack or roll. Body control over crests and dips, whether on the standard frequency-selective dampers and especially the up-spec adaptive kind, is disciplined enough.

And what if I want to take it easy?

The ride in any case has a certain turbulence to it. It’s not sharp or noisy, but it just won’t settle down at urban speed. On the motorway, it’s more placid and stable. The lane-centring and radar-cruise drive assistance works well.

The brakes use Alfa’s ‘integrated’ system – you press the pedal and an electronic controller decides how hard to squeeze the pads. This helps the hybrid system harvest more regeneration in light touches of the pedal. But the whole pedal travel is pretty soggy.

Now it’s true the issues with the powertrain, steering weight and brakes are ones you can ‘drive around’ and after a few hours you notice them less and find a pretty capable car underneath. But if a Tonale weren’t the only car you drove, you’d have to reacclimatise every time you got in.

Interior

What is it like on the inside?

On a superficial level, the Tonale’s cabin tickles you with some sentimental Alfa-heritage garnish. But crucially it also nails the premium-crossover fundamentals: space, ergonomics, quality, general habitability.

The instrument screen nods to the historic twin-porthole design, one circle being the speedo and the other the tacho. Readable and handsome. In between those, the remaining screen area can take the usual trip computer and navigation-arrow functions.

There’s no head-up display but that doesn’t matter, because the centre screen is well organised. You can split it into tiles that show the info you want. It’s also not crowded by climate soft-buttons: they’re hardware keys below the vents.

The mapping, phone and entertainment sections are responsive and handsome. The custom-button system is easily mastered. It was a warm afternoon, and I knew that later in the day I’d need to get back to the airport in a hurry. It was easy to set up the seat ventilation and the destination into these shortcuts.

Material quality and textures are good enough for the price, and it’s decorated with plenty of stitching and metallic details. Lots of recharging options for your gadgets: USB A and C, and a wireless pad. Wireless phone mirroring too, which makes good use of that charge pad on a road trip as it’s always a battery sucker.

The steering wheel carries the engine start button, and in Veloce trim a huge pair of aluminium shift paddles. The Ti version has no paddles, but at least the plus/minus shift gate works the correct (if uncommon) way: forward for down, back for up.

Three people can sit in the back and behind them is a competitive 500-litre boot.

Buying

What should I be paying?

Tricky one, as official UK prices haven’t been released as we write this first international review. Alfa UK will say only that it’s £35k for a kickoff, benchmarked against the BMW X1. The Tonale’s 160bhp puts it midway between the X1 18i and 20i.

It’s got plenty of equipment too: matrix headlamps, the full screen system, reversing camera and 18-inchers are standard (though it’s 19s in these pictures). That base car is called Ti. The Veloce trim steps up the wheels to 19s, adds various cosmetics, plus adaptive dampers and shift paddles.

We don’t yet have any prices for the 4×4 PHEV version. It’ll hit the streets some months later. Neither yet are there lease dates for any of them. More when we have it.

From a company that has been notorious for plummeting residuals and poor dealer service, the most compelling things about buying a Tonale are what happens afterward. For a start Alfa is raising the warranty to five years. Not quite industry leading, but a good show of faith in likely reliability.

Uniquely, you’ll also be given a non-fungible token, a blockchain-based digital artefact that sticks with the car. You can choose to keep its contents secret, or disclose it when you sell the car. Encoded in the token are details such as mileage, servicing, and number and depth of battery cycles. It’s a cyber-promise that you’ve looked after your Tonale, thus theoretically pumping up the value.

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