It may not be as sleek as its big sister the Giulietta, but the Alfa Romeo MiTo likes to be driven hard and now comes with ultra-smooth Twin Clutch Transmission.
Alfa Romeo cars are cool. They always have been and they hopefully always will be.
They’re as stylishly Italian as standing at the bar of a cafe in the middle of the morning in the middle of Rome sipping at a macchiato while a slender, long-legged, dark-haired companion rests her head on your shoulder as the world whizzes past.
They’re that cool.
That said you wouldn’t necessarily want to own an old one: not unless you’re keen to build up a special relationship with your local mechanic.
Alfa have always made distinctive, good-looking cars. The good news for Alfa fans is that these days they’re making distinctive, good-looking cars that you’d want to own.
There’s a reliability there now which was lacking in the past – you always felt that the person at Alfa charged with checking over your car before it left the factory was distracted by the girl from accounts who had to walk right past his work station several times per day on the way to the boss’s office.
Quite what has happened to improve the cars is unclear, but I’m guessing that the boss used his power to have the office of the girl from accounts put right next to his.
As a result, the guy charged with checking your car has lost his regular blast of eye candy and he’s getting through his heartache by throwing himself wholeheartedly into ensuring that once your car leaves the garage where you bought it, its return visits are infrequent and scheduled.
Of all the new Alfas, the sleek Giulietta has become the flagship of the brand. Giulietta is an Italian beauty and in the short space of time since her launch she’s attracted a fair number of Romeo-like suitors from among the doey-eyed motoring journalists who’ve had the pleasure of taking young Giulietta for a spin.
And once they’ve got past the initial elegance of her facade, she’s gone and given them all quite the ride.
But what of Giulietta’s little brother, the Alfa Romeo MiTo? He hasn’t had an Uma Thurman-fronted press campaign to help get him out there and this has meant that he’s become seriously at risk of being overlooked.
There aren’t many MiTos out there. The advantage of this, of course, is that if you own a MiTo and have a habit of waving at drivers of the same car that you come across whilst pootling around town you ain’t going to get any arm strain (unlike if you own a Renault Megane, for example).
Sturdy
But despite MiTos being few and far between on Irish roads, they deserve to be popular as they’re great little cars. Like the Giulietta, the MiTo comes with a great choice of petrol and diesel engines. Looks-wise they’re clearly related but distinctly different. Where the Giulietta looks sleek and agile, the MiTo looks sturdy and muscular.
The MiTo is Alfa’s answer to BMW’s Mini, and falls in the Supermini category, but you never feel like you’re driving a small car. Sit in the back where there’s just about room for three and you will definitely feel crammed in, but it never feels that you’re DRIVING a small car. And if it’s your car, it shouldn’t be too hard to ensure that you’re always in the driving seat or the front passenger seat.
As for the people in the back, they’ll eventually grow tired of moaning about the lack of space on long journeys. If they’re not happy they should buy their own car.
The fact that the doors extend quite a way up the sides means that there’s a lot of metal encasing you. This adds to the solid feel of the car, although the small rear windows do mean that it’s not always so easy to see what’s going on behind you.
Once inside, the cabin is sporty, well proportioned and Italian looking. It’s no more than you should expect from an Alfa, really, but it’s good to see that they’re not skimping when it comes to design flair. Buyers should go for as many trimmings as they can afford, particularly the leather interior which is stitched and finished to a standard that you’d find on an Armani suit.
To match its sturdy looks is a sturdy performance. The car I’ve been test driving has been the MiTo TCT (twin clutch transmission). Beneath the rounded contours of the TCT Alfa engineers have delved beneath the MiTo’s rounded contours to hide a remarkably smooth automatic transmission system.
To facilitate ultra-smooth gear changes involved fiddling with the transmission of one of the new C635 family of 6-speed gearboxes that debuted on the Alfa MiTo Cloverleaf and is so advanced it boasts a total of 23 patents.
Most importantly, the car was fitted out with what amounts to two gearboxes in parallel, each with its own dry clutch. This allows the selection and engagement of the subsequent gear while the previous gear is still transmitting engine power to the wheels.
Gear changes are then executed by instantaneously “swapping” clutches, a process which guarantees continuous torque delivery and traction, resulting in both smoother and faster changes than can be achieved by any other type of transmission. Clever, eh?
The car comes with a pair of paddle gear changers on the steering column, giving you plenty of control. To get full use out of the paddles you are clearly obliged to go out and drive the car for fun rather than just to get you from A to B.
It’s when pushing the car that you fully appreciate how the responsive 1.4 litre petrol 135bhp engine fights above its weight and how ‘chuckable’ the car is – it turns out that the sturdiness isn’t only skin deep.
Flick the switch in front of the gearstick from ‘N’ for normal to ‘D’ for dynamic and you really feel the car’s metaphorical muscles tightening. In this mode the TCT will hold the gears for longer and will shift down more aggressively. It can over-rev a little, but this is a small price to pay when put against the fun you’ll have.
The biggest benefit from the Twin Clutch Transmission, aside from the smoothness of gear changes, is that you get a cost-effective alternative to expensive automatic transmissions while also offering lower maintenance costs and a six percent improvement in fuel consumption.
Responsive
Yes it’s a petrol, with all the responsiveness you’d want from a petrol engine, but without the thirst of most petrol automatics.
In fact, when combined with Alfa Romeo’s ‘Start&Stop’ system, fuel consumption can go down by up to 10 percent compared to a traditional automatic – never a bad thing.
Before it only the Porsche Panamera had paired an automatic gearbox with a Stop/Start system and this pairing is the only cause of any real niggle about this car – there’s a definite lag between the car starting up and getting into first gear after it’s turned itself off at the traffic lights.
And this means that when you stop on a hill and the engine automatically cuts out, you don’t feel entirely confident that it’ll wake up again quickly enough to ensure you don’t roll back.
But this really is a small niggle in an otherwise great car. The base price for the ‘Lusso’ model is €20,995, with the ‘Veloce’ version I was driving (heated leather seats, paddles, fancy alloys) coming in at €24,000.
It gets 5.5 litres per hundred kilometers (combined), goes from 0 to 100km in 8.2 seconds and has a max speed of 208km/h. It slots into tax band B (€104) and has CO2 emissions are 129g/km.
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