The Giulia Quadrifoglio and the Stevia Quadrifoglio are two essential cars made by the Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio performance brand. Both have a 2.9-liter twin-turbo V6 engine that puts out 505 horsepower. Until recently, those were the only two cars it sold in the country. With the release of the Tamale compact, however, the brand now has a vehicle that doesn’t have a high-performance version. The CEO of Alfa Romeo North America says this could keep going on. Larry Dominique, the Senior Vice President and Head of Alfa Romeo and Fiat North America, says he wants to protect the Quadrifoglio name if the Ton ale can give it the same power boost as the company’s other cars. When Jerry Perez, Deputy Editor of The Drive, asked Dominique about making a model like BMW’s M-Sport or AMG’s 43/53, Dominique said, “If we can’t deliver the level of performance or delta of performance in our current models, we won’t do it.” “I’m open to it, as is [CEO] Jean-Philippe Imparta, but only with the right performance levels,” he noted in his statement. To be clear, the Tonal base is a success. It has a plug-in hybrid drivetrain with a 1.3-liter four-cylinder engine and an electric motor in the back powered by a 15.5-kWh lithium-ion battery pack. This gives it 285 hop, about the same as non-Quad Giulio’s and Stelios. To be as powerful as a Quadrifoglio, though, it would need about as much power as a standard Quad, between 450 and 500 ponies. The honest answer is that the Ton ale Quadrifoglio is a super-crossover. I’m not trying to be mean, but a car shaped like a jelly bean has about 20 gigatons of horsepower. Dominique went on to say that neither he nor the present CEO was directly involved in making the car, which is why the platform is so flexible. We are learning and thinking about what we could do with Tamale because the basic ideas for the platform and powertrain were made before we started our jobs. But we still need to develop a solution that meets our needs. “We’ll always try to give slightly better versions of our higher-selling trims like Velocity and so on,” he continued, “but Quadrifoglio has to be the best of the best. I wish to avoid arrogance. I want to protect Quadrifoglio image. I worry that we won’t be able to stay clean.
