Likely to be an SUV, model will be key to brands ambitions to push into US market
Alfa Romeo’s fifth model line will be a large E-segment vehicle to sit at the top of the range.
Outgoing CEO Jean-Philippe Imparato confirmed the car would most likely be a SUV, meaning it would rival the likes of the BMW iX and Porsche Cayenne, but he would allow his replacement Santo Ficili to reflect on the decision before further details are announced.
“He can reflect on this E-segment proposition in the coming months,” he told reporters at the Paris motor show.
This car would sit on parent Stellantis’s STLA Large architecture, which allows both combustion and electric set ups – the latter available with ultra-fast charging (via an 800V system) and can accept a range of high-powered motors and large batteries up to 118kWh allowing for some 500 miles of range.
Previously billed to arrive in 2027, it will follow next generations of the Stelvio in 2025 and a Giulia in 2026, both of which will sit on that same STLA Large platform rather than continue on Alfa’s bespoke Giorgio platform.
Imparato said the new Stelvio and Giulia would still “maintain and protect” Alfa’s driving dynamics despite this switch and it was “very, very impressive with the level of performance that can be achieved” with this architecture.
They would be offered with hybridised internal combustion engines and electric drivetrains as part of Stellantis’s multi-energy platform strategy and the firm would be able to adapt production up to 100% in one direction or another based on customer demand.
The new Stelvio and Giulia have already been shown to customers in Italy, Germany and the USA in clinics; Imparato said simply “boom!” had been the reaction from potential customers.
More generally on Alfa’s performance, Imparato said that Alfa had gone from “losing hundreds of millions to making hundreds of millions” in profit off the back of cutting costs and increasing the prices of its models.
He said the firm was not chasing volume, rather profitability, and to that end the firm had strong margins on every car sold and the “stock was clean” with every unit made being sold to a true buyer.
Earlier in the day at the Paris motor show, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares had said that “Alfa was deeply in the red” at the start of the Stellantis merger, “it was for sale” but “we turned it around”.
He said it now makes “good margins and profits”, although Stellantis does not split out the individual performance of its brands.
