Alfa Romeo Giulia Speciale 2.2 Turbo Diesel 180hp auto 4d Owner Review

Does the car do everything you expected it to do?

Whilst the Giulia is a stunning looking car and a good, exciting drive if falls severely short on its interior and its technology: 1. Excessive interior condensation on cool (not cold days). It takes an age to de-mist and often requires wiping of the windscreen and rear-view mirror. 2. On cold days (-1, -2 degree) I get ice on the inside of the windscreen leading to water running down onto the dashboard. Nearly impossible to de-mist before driving. 3. Electric wing mirrors and windows freeze and won't open. 4. SatNav not that reliable, often takes a few minutes to start up. 5. Seat position memory often forgets your setting and reclines you to the furthest back position. 6. Infotainment interface not great, too much scrolling involved in navigating. 7. Browsing an iPod is difficult, you can only scroll through alphabetically meaning if you have 400+ artists or albums, you rarely have the patience to scroll past 'F' or 'G' (dangerous when driving) This is because the search function does not work i.e. you can type in the first few letters of an artist and the system find it for you rather than scroll alphabetically. I think this is an indexing issue or software problem. 8. Rear seats fold down, but having done this 3 times, I've had to return the car to the dealer to fix the seat release catches twice! Very unreliable. 9. The various beeps and alarms are ridiculously loud. Unlocking/locking the car will wake up your neighbours and you can't change the volume. 10. If you get out of the vehicle and try to open the boot using the manual release, it will lock the car. Really frustrating when you get to the supermarket - you have to open the boot from the button in the footwell before getting out.