First drive: Alfa Romeo Giulietta

What a very, very good car this is. The Giulietta - Alfa's long-awaited replacement for the 147 - is, by every grown-up, road-testerish criterion, a genuine rival for the Golf and A3.

Words: Sam Philip

Honest. If you're thinking of buying a Golf, put the Giulietta on your ‘to really consider quite seriously' list. It drives well - excellently, in fact - and has a fine range of turbocharged, direct injection engines. Interior space is much improved on the 147, refinement is good, build quality appears to be almost... German.

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Spotted a ‘but' looming large on the horizon? Yeah, you're right. But let's leave the ‘but' to one side for a second, and talk about the Giulietta's underpinnings.

You're not looking at a Bravo in a smarter suit. The Giulietta is the first car to get Fiat's boringly-named-but-thoroughly-excellent ‘Compact' platform, formed of lightweight, high-tensile steel to keep weight down. This means it's lightish and, with aluminium multi-link suspension at the rear, brilliantly supple on the road, striking a neat balance between comfort and agile handling.

Grip - even on the sodden Italian roads of our test drive - is impressive, and there's an almost organic quality to the steering that makes your A3 feel lifeless. It's great. Fun.

We drove the 167bhp version of Alfa's 1.4-litre four-pot turbo petrol engine, featuring Fiat's clever new ‘MultiAir' variable-valve tech (a 118bhp version of the same engine, as well as two diesels in 104bhp and 168bhp flavour).

Objectively, grown-uppedly, this engine is excellent. It'll do 0-62mph in just under eight seconds and, equipped with stop-start as standard, will manage 49mpg and 134g/km of CO2. Those are impressive figures, and it's an impressively refined unit: power delivery is smooth and progressive, the boost barely noticeable.

But - and yes, here's the ‘but' - it's a little soulless. There's a defiant lack of rasp and crackle from the exhaust, a slight unwillingness to charge headlong to the redline. And that's our only gripe with the Giulietta overall. It is, undoubtedly, a fine, grown-up car, but on first impressions it's just lacking that final dollop of Alfa's trademark fizz.

Maybe it's just a visual thing: though the Giulietta isn't a minger by any means, but - if you'll excuse the rampant subjectivity - isn't Alfa's most elegant design of recent years. Maybe we're trying to eat our cake and have it: we spend years moaning about the flimsiness of Alfas, and then as soon as they build a solid, refined car, we moan that it's characterless. Either way, though the Giulietta caters brilliantly to the Golf/Focus market, maybe it's just a little too sober to grab unreformed petrolheads by the man-parts.

The soon-to-arrive Giulietta Cloverleaf - Alfa's Golf GTI rival, which will pack 235bhp and meatier visuals, should help that. We'll wait until then to declare ourselves smitten with the Giulietta. For now, we sturdily salute the newest Alfa as a fine, mainstream car.