First Drive: Alfa Romeo Tonale 2022 review

Alfa Romeo needs a small SUV. It’s a horrible sentence to write, but the Tonale is possibly the most important car in Alfa Romeo’s recent history (we’ve said that before). In 2021 the company sold just 1,574 cars in the UK, that is less than half the number of Taycans Porsche sold. And it’s not because they don’t make good cars. We’ve already waxed-lyrical over the Giulia saloon and the Stelvio SUV and their slightly nuts Quadrifoglio versions. But neither is a volume seller and neither sits in a big volume market – yes SUVs sell, but smaller ones sell bigger.

So the Tonale, fitting into roughly the same frame as a BMW X1 or a Volkswagen Tiguan, is the important one. New CEO Jean-Philippe Imparato has big plans for Alfa. There’s a bold strategy to be fully EV-only by 2027 – just five years away – and a wish to bring back some of the more cherished sportscar names of Alfa history. But first off, the company needs to fund itself while also learning about electrification, so here is a mild-hybrid SUV.

All SUVs look roughly the same, you can change the styling of the front and rear, but in the end there’s a bonnet with an engine, a slightly bulbous cabin and a big-ish boot. Thankfully Alfa has used the touchpoints – where it can make a difference – to add as much individuality as possible. The Tonale introduces a fresh face for Alfa Romeo, and it’s a bit more angular, a bit more angry. Consider the Tonale to be the Stelvio’s naughty younger brother, furious that it’s been told off.

The new look starts with wider, slimmer front lights, each inset with a trio of LED daytime running lights, almost 159 style. There’s a blend into the traditional Alfa Romeo grille with negative space, and that trad triangle pushes into the lower grille. The bonnet is now almost a clamshell, reaching down to just droop over the top of the lights, perhaps taking a tiny bit of inspiration from the Montreal? But maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part.

The rear now has the standard full-width rear light that features on practically all modern cars, but the classy DRLs of the front have been copied and pasted to the rear, giving the single-bar light the look of a pen flourish. It’s a good design, adding some levity to a car that from the side is a bit of an unavoidable blob.

There are two versions of the Alfa Romeo Tonale at launch. Both come with a four-cylinder engine mated to a 48V mild-hybrid system and a seven-speed dual clutch gearbox. The base 130PS (95kW) car will never make it to the UK, so we will stick with the slightly more powerful 160PS (118kW), 240Nm (177lb ft) model. The mild-hybrid system contributes a max 20PS (15kW) extra from its 0.8kWh batteries. That means the Tonale can hit 62mph in 8.8 seconds, which is a surprisingly sprightly number.

It has to be said that it doesn’t feel so. There’s very little showcase of the hybrid system’s electric torque-fill when you put your foot down, unlike some similar systems. The Tonale’s four-cylinder makes a noise that you’re happy is suppressed at slow speeds rather than wishing for augmentation, and it doesn’t set the world alight in its work. Being saddled with a particularly limp gearbox doesn’t help. We drove the car in its UK base Ti spec (like the transmission, there are lower specs for Europe, but we won’t see them), and it comes without paddles or two-stage adaptive dampers. It leaves you often wishing for a paddle to just shove the transmission in the right direction.

Some of the hesitance and irritation do seem to come from the fierce complexity of this 48v system. Sometimes when you stamp on the throttle it bogs, or thrashes out a tonne of extra revs for no real reason as the systems try to balance the torque of two transmissions. Hopefully this might be more refined by the time the car reaches the UK.

And that is a shame, because underneath there has definitely been good work done. The Tonale shares a platform with Jeep rather than Peugeot, a hangover from its development starting pre-Stellantis uber-merger, but it never feels as disappointing as its cousin the Compass does. Even without the fancier adaptive dampers the Tonale comes with what’s called “Frequency Selective Damping”, which in simple terms means the dampers react to the vibrations from the road to change the ride. When the going gets rough the dampers slack off and absorb everything, when it’s smoother and you’re pushing on they tighten up. That system works well. The Alfa feels comfortable through rutted Italian towns and planted on smoother country roads. It has been set up to resist the kind of roll that some of its fellow small SUVs suffer from.

There are three modes in all Tonales, from the long-standing DNA selector. Selecting dynamic mode in a car fitted with the dual-stage dampers will tighten up the ride, but the Ti does not come with those. Instead, it quickens throttle response and sharpens the gearbox. Sadly, not enough to iron out the transmission’s flaws. The economic A mode restricts the delivery of torque to maximise efficiency around town.

That is where the mild-hybrid system comes into its own. If you are gentle you can get up to around 20mph before the petrol engine ever bursts into life and the Tonale will sit and move in slow stop start traffic without ever burning any petrol. It’ll also complete manoeuvres like parking in stealth mode. Each of these is a particularly inefficient part of a car’s job, so going full electric for these moments increases efficiency significantly.

The steering is very quick and accurate and you can plant the nose, but there is next to no feedback between front wheel and hand thanks to a very over-assisted rack. While that means it doesn’t have the fizz you might have hoped for, it does help significantly around town.

The Alfa Romeo Tonale’s interior is a big development over the one found in the Stelvio and Giulia. The classic instrument binnacle remains, with its two round recesses for dials, and the wheel is the same, but pretty much everything else has changed. Gone is the old rotary dial for controlling the infotainment, gone is the creaky plastic gearstick. Now the main 10.25-inch touchscreen is controlled purely by touch. Quite sensibly, it has been moved forward on the dash, now sitting slightly proud of a rather fetching plastic ambient light fitting. The old Alfa screens could be touch-controlled, but it was a stretch, this has been thought out much better.

Below, there are a line of proper switches for the climate control and a large recess for the wireless phone charger – beware if you have a larger phone that the 12V socket gets in the way and you might need to take its cover off to get your phone in. The new heated and ventilated seats are comfortable, and it’s a very dark but high-quality place to sit. Of course, it wouldn’t be an Italian car without there being a weirdly sharp edge to the seatbelt recess, but the rest of the cabin feels high quality.

When you add together the 10.25-inch main touchscreen and the 12.3-inch digital dash, the Tonale is clocking in with 22.5-inches of screen, which is a class leading amount. The good thing is that Alfa Romeo has also updated the system on it. There’s not been a focus on extra features, but it’s now a very simple and efficient system to use. To top it off Amazon Alexa has been integrated, much like the new Maserati Grecale, which means that you can request almost anything on the move. One party trick that comes with Alexa and the connectivity to your home or phone is that you can do things like remotely unlock your car if someone wants to leave a package at your home and you’re not there.

Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are also standard on the base Ti as well as the LED DRLs, automatic wipers, parking sensors, rear-view camera, powered boot lid, keyless entry and go, dual-zone climate control, automatic cruise control, the big screens and wireless charging. An upgrade to Veloce spec adds 19-inch diamond cut alloys, dual-stage dampers, shift paddles and privacy glass.

The mild-hybrid system has also been packaged very well. Alfa Romeo has managed to make it compact enough to remove it from the boot, stowing the system entirely between the front seats where the transmission tunnel would have been if this weren’t a front-wheel-drive car. It weighs just 18kg, so has barely made a difference to the Tonale’s 1,600kg and moving it to the front adds 11 litres to the Tonale’s 500-litre boot. It also has a battery that works up at 22kW partnered to a motor that can use just 15kW – which should ensure it’s never short of power when called upon.

Finally, the Tonale is the first car on sale to come with its own NFT. Thankfully this isn’t about apes, owning JPEGs, or John Terry. Alfa Romeo is using the blockchain tech in NFTs to create a proper ownership history of the car. When you activate the NFT it will keep a history of the car, which means that when it comes to be sold, or you come to buy a new one, you have proof of who has owned it and things like real mileage, battery life and condition. If it works, it could be a very good thing for the second hand car industry, but it does depend on people actually using it.

You can’t help but be a teeny bit let down by the promises of an SUV that delivered that Alfa spark. The drivetrain is clever and excellent around town – although there is more judder on change between EV and ICE than some rivals – and packed with interesting ideas, but when you ask it for more it can be lacking.

That said, the chassis is promising, and there is a 275PS (202kW) plug-in hybrid incoming that might suit its characteristics better. We should all then spend as much time as possible convincing Alfa Romeo to make a Tonale Quadrifoglio to really unlock it. The dampers are very good, even in their un-adjustable base setting, and the extremely fast steering means nipping around town is extremely easy. Tonales will start from £36,000 in the UK, which does put the little Alfa above many of its competitors, including VW Tiguan, BMW X1, Mercedes GLA, but it’s packed with tech and those rivals cannot match the Alfas chassis or get close to the looks.

The Tonale might not be perfect, but it has a lot of ingredients to like and, if it does what Alfa Romeo hopes, it should be followed by cars we’ve craved for years.