Alfa Romeo Giulietta TCT 2012 Review

What we liked
>> Fast, clean, smooth gear shifts
>> Brings out Giulietta’s best character
>> Dynamic mode better than ever

Not so much
>> Too eager to save fuel in Natural mode
>> Handling lacks Golf GTI sparkle

The shame of Alfa Romeo’s TCT gearbox is that it made its debut in the three-door MiTo, so nobody really noticed.

For reasons best known to Alfa’s chassis and suspension engineers, the MiTo isn’t the best home for a six-speed, dual-clutch transmission, yet it feels so good in the Giulietta that you’d swear the two devices were born to bring out the best in each other.

The TCT (Twin Clutch Transmission) is clever, smooth, innovative, light, fuel-efficient and cost-effective, yet Alfa has chosen to slot it in beside only two engines in the Giulietta’s range. They both boast 125kW, but one is a turbo-diesel and one is a turbo-petrol, and it’s hard to imagine how they could arrive at that point in more different ways. We can explain, but it’s technical, which is why it has its own section…

In more general terms, the TCT deletes a pedal from the Giulietta’s foot well and introduces a traditional automatic transmission shift lever to the centre console; even though it’s not an automatic transmission. It also introduces a manual mode to the system, and it does it two ways: through a separate shift gate for the gear lever (with forward as a down-shift, as it should be) and via optional steering wheel-mounted shift paddles.

It also rings in unheralded changes to the Alfa DNA system, which changes the car’s character by swapping between electronic maps for the throttle response, the gearshift character, the stability and traction control systems and even the Q2 electronic locking differential.

Alfa has wired in a wider gap between the Dynamic and the Normal modes in the three-mode system (the third is for All Weather – which is meant for snow and ice and is unlikely to be useful to the average Australian). In fact, the gap has grown so wide that Alfa renamed the N mode to Natural, which came as something of a surprise to Alfa’s own communications team.

The rationale is that the N mode is now more of a daily-drive, fuel-economy mode, while Dynamic has become even more, well, dynamic.

You can smash the accelerator pedal into the firewall, step off the brake and surge to 100km/h in 7.7 seconds in the MultiAir, which is brisk rather than sparkling. In fact, that last line is about the story of the Giulietta as a whole.

The MultiAir is not tremendously quick in a straight line, but it is tremendously flexible. For a 1.4-litre engine – even one with a turbocharger – 250Nm of torque is a stupendous achievement, especially when it arrives at just 2500rpm. With the power peak chiming in at 5500rpm and the engine starting to develop proper torque from as little as 1800 revs, it’s tremendously flexible and it’s just as happy at 2000 revs as it is at 5000. Granted, that’s not always what people want or expect from the Alfa badge, but it just makes it easier to live with.

It also helps that it sips only 5.2L/100km (for CO2 emissions of 121g/km) and the car always feels like it weighs considerably more than its 1310kg.

The transmission is, for the most part, a welcome addition in all of this. It helps the Giulietta to lower its consumption, it is smoother in its gear changes than most automatics and it even comes with start-stop.

In its efforts not to scare off the automatic-tranny set, Alfa has also engineered “creep” into it (it’s an inherent characteristic of torque converters, not dual-clutch gearboxes) so you don’t need to poke the throttle when you take off from the lights or move around in parking situations.

The only significant issue we found, at least on the MultiAir version, was that it was a bit too willing to race through the gears in the Natural mode. That might help the Alfa’s fuel economy numbers, but it means that, sooner or later, you’re going to have to hunt it back down to accelerate away from something.

That said, the shifts themselves are silky smooth and very fast, but the Alfa really does now need to have its DNA toggle moved into D before it starts to act in a remotely sporty way.

Try to convince the N mode to kickdown mid corner, and you’ll find that it doggedly sticks to its taller-is-better attitude (intentional, Alfa says, to create a bigger gap between D and N, though it’s probably more to do with economy than anything else). Still, you can always flick the gearshift paddle to make it do what you want.

Or you can just use the Dynamic mode, which makes the Giulietta behave like a more enthusiastic version of itself. It might have gearshift paddles but, when it’s left to its own devices (in Drive), it gets the job done almost as well as your own moves. It holds on to the gear at high revs and downshifts under braking without upsetting the stability. It snaps through the gearchanges brilliantly and it cleanly engages without losing any power to the wheels.

Even though the petrol engine is the quicker of the TCT powerplants and it’s willing up until around 5500rpm (it loses some composure and introduces some coarse vibrations beyond that), the day-to-day benefits of the 2.0-litre JTDM were had to ignore.

It’s so strong and flexible, with 350Nm of torque arriving at 1750rpm, but real urgency from 1400, and it’s also smooth all the way across its rev range, beyond the 4000rpm power peak and through to the 4500rpm rev limiter. And a consumption number of 4.5L/100km never hurts…

This is its only downfall, and it’s only a matter of software tuning. It’s strong enough in the midrange to cope handsomely with the TCT’s early upshifts in N mode, but Dynamic sees the gearbox letting the engine rev out to the redline, when the motor has given its best 400 revs earlier and then had a performance fade out.

Still, you just pull it across to manual mode and shift the gear at 4000 revs instead, so the tacho needle drops back into the strength of the mid-range, and that’s when the car is at its quickest and smoothest.

With the lower weight of the petrol engine over the front end of the Giulietta, it could be thrown into corners at ridiculous speeds, only to fall into a stance that clearly showed the driver it was out of grip without feeling like typical front-drive understeer. Instead, the Giulietta involves both ends of the car and, when accelerating out of corners, hides ham-fisted pedal stomps by using the Q2 diff to punch its drive through the outside front tyre.

It’s never quite sparkles, but it’s incredibly stable, even over mid-corner bumps and camber changes, and the diesel is even more so than the petrol version. While its 7.9-second sprint to 100km/h trails the MultiAir by 0.2 seconds (and they share a 218km/h top speed), it’s actually a tenth of a second faster in the 80-120km/h in-gear sprint. 

The whole engine is pulled straight out of the MiTo MultiAir Quadrifoglio Verde the top end of the engine is both new and clever, making do without an inlet camshaft.

Instead, it uses an extra bump on the exhaust camshaft to pump up some extra engine oil to directly drive the inlet valves. Before the oil gets to the valve, though, it has to run through a solenoid, which is electrically opened or closed and allows Alfa to infinitely vary everything about the inlet valves’ opening.

It means the MiTo has no throttle butterfly and, instead of having a camshaft shape compromised at 2000rpm so it can happily run at 6000rpm or vice versa, Alfa’s boffins have basically written as many different camshaft profiles into the engine’s computer as they could, so it has the ideal “cam profile” for any job.

It’s so flexible that it can even open and close the valves twice per stroke if it needs to, plus it provides many of direct-fuel injection’s benefits without the price. Alfa claims it can guarantee an increase of around 10 per cent in power and 15 per cent in torque, while dropping CO2 emissions by 10 per cent and NOx emissions by up to 60 per cent.

Alfa engineers insisted that the TCT could handle 400Nm of input torque, but the gearbox’s official maximum rating is 350Nm, which is precisely the maximum torque the 2.0-litre turbo-diesel JTDM four-cylinder produces.

It’s the first time the engine and gearbox have been used together and it produces a strong, calm and effective machine.

It’s chassis doesn’t quite sparkle, but it’s handling is safe, predictable and makes its driver look good. The new TCT ‘box is fast, jolt-free and nimble. It makes driving the Giulietta quickly even easier than it was before, it makes driving it slowly even easier than it was before and it’s also more convenient and more economical.

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