LIKES
- Sensuous lines
- A sport sedan on stilts
- Powerful engines
- Excellent balance
DISLIKES
- Wooden brake feel
- Tiny back seat
- Rising prices
- Quadrifoglio’s stiff ride
BUYING TIP
Sporty and attractive, the 2022 Alfa Romeo Stelvio is fun to drive but has a compromised rear seat.
What kind of car is the 2022 Alfa Romeo Stelvio? What does it compare to?
Based on the Giulia sport sedan, the Alfa Romeo Stelvio is a sporty compact crossover with standard rear-wheel drive and optional all-wheel-drive. It takes on excellent crossovers like the Audi Q5, BMW X3, Mercedes-Benz GLC-Class, and Porsche Macan.
Is the 2022 Alfa Romeo Stelvio a good car?
The 2022 Alfa Romeo Stelvio’s stylish looks, agile moves, and strong engines earn it a TCC rating of 6.6 out of 10.
What's new for the 2022 Alfa Romeo Stelvio?
Alfa Romeo switches around its lineup again this year, replacing the Ti Sport with a model called Veloce. It joins Sprint, Ti, and Quadrifoglio models. Alfa also adds standard safety and convenience features, with a roughly $4,000 price increase to match. The new safety features include active blind-spot monitors, adaptive cruise control, automatic high beams, and front and rear parking sensors. It also gets standard heated front and rear seats, navigation, and wireless smartphone charging.
Those seats hug occupants and sportier buckets are offered as well. The front row also gets a standard 8.8-inch touchscreen and traditional gauges instead of a digital instrument cluster.
The Giulia roots create a tiny back seat that’s the worst in the class. Cargo space, however, is decent at up to 56.5 cubic feet.
The Giulia platform and powertrains are a boon to performance. A strong, well-balanced structure makes every Stelvio agile, aided by notably quick steering. The Quadrifoglio model adds the equipment necessary for track prowess.
The base engine, a 280-hp 2.0-liter turbo-4, makes the Stelvio quick right out of the box, with a 0-60 mph time of 5.4 seconds. The Quadrifoglio’s Ferrari-sourced 2.9-liter twin-turbo V-6 cranks up the output to 505 hp and drops the 0-60 mph sprint to just 3.6 seconds. Both work through a responsive 8-speed automatic transmission.
Fuel economy matches the power. The turbo-4 delivers fuel economy up to 25 mpg combined, and the Quadrifoglio’s twin-turbo V-6 drinks fuel to the tune of 19 mpg combined.
How much does the 2022 Alfa Romeo Stelvio cost?
The Stelvio ranges from $46,645 for a Sprint to $88,445 for the Quadrifoglio. The Sprint comes loaded with the features listed above, plus leather upholstery, power front seats, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, a power tailgate, and 18-inch alloy wheels.
In Italy.
Styling
With its triangular nose and rounded lines, the 2022 Alfa Romeo Stelvio cuts a unique shape in a cookie cutter class.
Is the Alfa Romeo Stelvio a good-looking car?
Yes, it’s curvaceous and sleek on the outside, with a cockpit that feels wrapped around the driver. We award it two points for its exceptional body and one for its cabin to give it an 8 here.
The Stelvio’s swept back and rounded design flows from the triangular “scudetto” grille. It’s flanked by horizontal headlights with wide LED brows above and large air intakes below. Rounded edges lead into upper and lower side character lines that rise toward the rear to provide a sense of motion. Slim taillights play off the headlights, and the Stelvio gets either dual or quad exhaust to highlight its performance bent.
Performance
A 2022 Alfa Romeo Stelvio’s sport sedan roots show through in its agile moves.
The Stelvio stands out as one of the sportier SUVs on the market. We rate it an 8 out of 10 for performance for its excellent handling and the willing power of the base engine. The Stelvio Quadrifoglio ups the game in both areas.
Is the Alfa Romeo Stelvio AWD?
Rear-wheel drive is standard on the base model and all-wheel drive is optional. All other models have all-wheel drive.
It’s quick in its base form and thunderous as the Quadrifoglio. The standard engine is a 2.0-liter turbo-4 that spins out 280 hp and 306 lb-ft of torque. It’s even quicker than expected, launching the Stelvio from 0-60 mph in 5.4 seconds and pushing the SUV to a 144-mph top speed. It has slight lag off the line, but power comes on quickly, and stays at the ready thanks to a quick-shifting 8-speed automatic transmission.
The Stelvio Quadrifoglio’s twin-turbo 2.9-liter V-6 turns conjures 505 hp and 443 lb-ft of torque. It barks and growls as it supplies power to unlock a 3.6-second 0-60 mph time and a 176-mph top speed.
While the Quadrifoglio is the track star, every Stelvio has a very quick 12:1 steering ratio that teams with a perfect 50/50 weight balance to provide agile moves with controlled body lean. A torque-vectoring rear differential is available with the base engine and standard for the Quadrifoglio to put the power efficiently to the pavement when exiting turns. The brake-by-wire system can feel wooden, but the brakes are strong.
Every Stelvio comes with a drive-mode selector that loosens or sharpens the reactions depending on the driving situation.
Comfort & Quality
The 2022 Alfa Romeo Stelvio has great front seats and awful rear seats.
The 2022 Alfa Romeo Stelvio gets the same tight rear seat as the Giulia sedan upon which it’s based. We rate it a 6 here, adding points for its front seat and cargo space, but taking one back for that cramped rear seat.
Alfa outfits the Stelvio with sporty front buckets that support occupants through fast corners, and the Quadrifoglio model’s seats have even more bolstering for even better support.
The rear seat, however, suffers from a tiny 31.9 inches of leg room, like you get in steerage class on a discount airline. Head room is fine back there and you could fit three across, but that’s embarrassingly little leg room.
Leather upholstery comes standard and the rest of the cabin materials match the Stelvio’s price point. The Quadrifoglio model costs much more, but it also gets additional leather surfaces and carbon-fiber trim.
Safety
The Alfa Romeo Stelvio now comes with more safety equipment.
How safe is the Alfa Romeo Stelvio?
The Alfa Romeo Stelvio finally comes with a healthy set of standard safety features, but it still doesn’t have crash-test ratings, so we can’t assign it a score here.
The 2022 Alfa Romeo comes standard with automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, active blind-spot monitors, automatic high beams, and front and rear parking sensors. Also offered are active lane control, a driver-attention monitor, traffic sign recognition, and a traffic jam assist system that can control the steering, brake, and throttle in certain low-speed highway situations.
Features
The Stelvio is packed with features and Alfa Romeo offers more performance and luxury options.
Every Stelvio comes loaded up with equipment, and buyers can get plenty of options. Given those strengths, we rate it a 7 here.
Which Alfa Romeo Stelvio should I buy?
The Stelvio Sprint may be the base model, but it’s anything but base and we think it’s the model to pick. For $46,645, it comes standard with leather upholstery, 10-way power-adjustable front seats with 4-way lumbar adjustments, front and rear heated seats, navigation, wireless smartphone charging, interior ambient lighting, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto compatibility, satellite radio, an 8.8-inch center touchscreen, Brembo brakes, adaptive headlights, a power tailgate, and 18-inch alloy wheels. We’d spring for the additional $2,000 for all-wheel drive.
The Stelvio Quadrifoglio starts at $88,445, $6,100 more than last year. It adds a 14-way adjustable sport seats, a 900-watt Harman Kardon audio system with 14 speakers, carbon-fiber interior trim, adaptive dampers, bigger Brembo brakes, a two-mode exhaust system, a torque-vectoring rear differential, and bigger summer performance tires on 20-inch wheels.
Stelvio infotainment
Drivers can control the Stelvio’s infotainment screen with touch controls, voice commands, or a center rotary dial. It’s relatively easy to use and an improvement versus the clumsy initial system, but it doesn’t stand out among better systems offered by rivals.
Fuel Economy
Get the turbo-4, and the 2022 Alfa Romeo Stelvio's gas mileage isn't bad.
Is the Alfa Romeo Stelvio good on gas?
The Stelvio may be sporty but it isn’t too thirsty with the base engine, which represents the bulk of the sales. We rate it a 4 out of 10 based on the 22 mpg city, 28 highway, 24 combined EPA ratings of the 2.0-liter turbo-4 with all-wheel drive.
Opt for rear-wheel drive, and the ratings increase slightly to 22/29/25 mpg.
Every Stelvio requires premium fuel.
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