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Michael Taylor2 Oct 2009
REVIEW

Alfa Romeo MiTo MultiAir and MultiAir Quadrifoglio Verde

A superb all-rounder... This is the MiTo to have

Alfa Romeo MiTo MultiAir and MultiAir Quadrifoglio Verde



International First Drive
Balocco, Italy


What we liked
>> Breadth of engine performance
>> Amazing fuel economy
>> Clever, user-friendly engineering


Not so much
>> Not as coherent as MINI
>> Extra-long doors
>> Lack of cabin oddments space


Overall rating: 4.5/5.0
Engine/Drivetrain/Chassis: 4.5/5.0
Price, Packaging and Practicality: 3.0/5.0
Safety: 4.5/5.0
Behind the wheel: 4.0/5.0
X-factor: 4.0/5.0


About our ratings


There's been something in the water over Turin way ever since Sergio Marchionne took the top job there. The whole Fiat Group has been gathering momentum since Sergio took charge and, while they burst onto the global scene by buying up Chrysler without paying a cent, hindsight could best remember his frenzied initial period for this car.


In a time when the petrol engine is improving by tiny increments thanks to expensive materials, blow-hard turbochargers and over-strained software code writers, the Alfa Romeo MiTo MultiAir looks to have provided a good, old-fashioned mechanical breakthrough. What's more, it's a breakthrough that is relatively inexpensive to make and bolts on to almost any engine -- and it conquers the car world's Number One goal conflict by delivering more power, more torque, less consumption and fewer emissions (for more on how MultiAir works see below).


And it's a pretty nice thing to drive, too. For all the talk of its breakthrough technology, the MultiAir MiTo is about as flexible, strong and swift as a mid-sized V6, but delivers the fuel consumption you'd expect of its 1.4-litre four-cylinder turbo engine.


There have been other changes to the MiTo, but they're minor compared to where Alfa has gone with the engine in this, its first real flag-waving high-technology car in since the common-rail diesel engine.


Launched in three versions, the petrol-powered MultiAir MiTos range from a 77kW non-turbo base model to a 99kw turbo and the range-topping Quadrifoglio Verde (green cloverleaf) with 125kW (more below). While we had no chance to drive the atmo engine, both the turbos proved themselves to be smooth, sweet and incredibly, deceptively strong at low engine speeds.


The expected big seller of the family, the 99kW, 1.4-litre turbo, is so strong that Alfa has done away with the six-speed gearbox from the existing MiTo and replaced it with a five-speed unit.


"The engine has very high torque and a very wide range so it does not need six gears anymore. It would just be more weight, more cost, more complication," MiTo project leader Guido Rovai explained.


And on our initial drive, Rovai seems absolutely correct. Not only does the MiTo's little engine spin happily beyond its 5000rpm power peak to 6000, but it can overboost in Sport mode to come up with 206Nm of torque -- at an amazingly low 1750rpm. That gives it the widest spread of useful performance that we can think -- and not just from any four-cylinder engine, either.


As an experiment, we asked the 99kW MiTo to pull up a slight hill in top gear from 1000rpm. And, while you'd hardly call it acceleration, it kept pulling without a shudder or a grumble.


Drive it in normal-traffic mode and you find yourself being lazy with the gearbox because the car can cope with it. It's so much happier than the slightly laggy set-up on the current MiTo that Alfa has fitted it with its first Start-Stop technology, which kills the engine when you pop neutral at the lights, then refires when you move the (now shorter) stick into a gear slot or release the brake pedal.


It will calmly pull a gear higher than most four-cylinder cars are capable of, which is good for both noise and fuel economy, and it's light (at 1135kg) so its rolling in-gear acceleration is terrific for a B-segment car.


An outright number of 8.4sec for the 0-100km/h sprint (with a 207km/h top speed) might not seem scintillating, but in real-world, every-day situations, it's superb. And other numbers are better, though, including a city fuel consumption number of just 7.4L/100km and a diesel-esque combined city/highway claim of just 5.6L/100km, which leaves it with only 129g/km of CO2. Can't argue with that.


It's not perfect, though, and MiTo criticisms remain. The doors, shaped for style, are so long they can't be opened wide enough even if the car fits the parking space. There's still nowhere to put anything in the cabin and the boot lip is high and space there is limited anyway.


Some moderate tweaks to the steering and suspension have perked it up in the twisty bits, though. It doesn't rear-steer so much anymore and it's much more confident attacking the early parts of a corner than it was, while still pulling out the other side with a little too much body roll, but utter predictability.


Even so, attacking the MINI spec-for-spec on the same price isn't going to be the MiTo's forte, because its Fiat Punto-based chassis isn't quite up to the MINI's standards of rigidity, even if it's a five-star NCAP crasher.


Instead, even though the technology is clever, practical and high-quality, you'll come for the history, the charm or the looks and, finally, the technology will help you stay happy with your choice.


HOW THE MULTIAIR WORKS
The Fiat Group's new MultiAir technology is a deceptively simple system.


Engines are widely regarded as glorified air pumps. The more air you can pump through in a controlled manner, the better all your numbers will be. The trouble is achieving that control, and all manner of schemes have been tried before, with various levels of success.


Variable valve timing is an obvious strategy, but people have gone down development paths to finely control the valves with electrical, hydraulic, air and even rotary systems, but none of them have worked commercially.


The Fiat Group attacked an old theoretical idea of electro-hydraulic activation and made it work.  Essentially, a dual overhead cam engine will have two camshafts -- one for the air inlet cams and one for the exhaust cams. The MiTo MultiAir sheds the inlet cam and uses an extra bump on the exhaust cam to pump some extra engine oil through 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 valve opening cycle.


It means the MiTo has no throttle and, instead of having a camshaft shape compromised at 2000rpm, so it can happily run at 6000rpm, Alfa's boffins have basically written as many different camshaft profiles into the engine's computer as they could, so it has the ideal "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 MultiAir 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.


It's also relatively easy to produce, even though all new technologies are initially expensive. While it removes the inlet camshaft, the rest of the cylinder head remains basically intact, except for the addition of an oil channel for the hydraulic fluid. The rest of the system, which basically is a module for each cylinder, sits inside the standard camshaft carrying cradle, which means it's a simple job on the production line and can be dropped onto any existing engine.


AND WHAT OF THE HOTTIE?
If the standard MiTo MultiAir is notable for its strength, the MiTo MultiAir Quadrifoglio Verde (oh, please don't make me write that again) is notable for being a superb all-rounder. It takes more aggressive software and a bigger turbocharger and translates that into 125kW of power and up to 250Nm of torque -- in a package just 10kg heavier than the 99kW turbo version.


Based on the same MultiAir four-cylinder turbo engine as its little brother, the QV moves back to a six-speed gearbox, gains an active suspension damping system, sprints to 100km/h in 7.5 seconds and still manages just 139 grams of CO2/km.


Where the stock MiTo is strong, the Quadrifoglio Verde is immediately a sharper tool, with its revs rising and falling with more speed and a louder, more aggressive exhaust system. In fact, it has the highest specific output (power-per-litre) of any Alfa production car in history, with 124hp/litre.


And that engine performance is helped by the closer ratios of the six-speed box. It fair bursts off the line with a tidy front-drive chirp, then the louder exhaust sends a very Alfa-esque howl through the cabin and, all the while, the QV gives the impression that it's so strong, with such a wide spread of performance, that you could happily skip every second gear and not be much slower.


It's still strong in town; it's still easy to manage at any engine speed; and it will still pull top gear from just 1100rpm -- and it still runs the engine Start-Stop system. Its torque peak arrives (at 2500rpm) slightly higher than it does in the standard car, but it's still very low and very flexible for a petrol engine and more typical of a diesel, yet this doesn't drive like a diesel.


Where the stock MiTo has become a lovely companion, the QV is that, too, but can become a bundle of fun at the flick of Alfa's DNA system. This system has always been standard on the MiTo and stands for its Dynamic, Normal and All-Weather modes. Flick the little chromed lever and you'll get the appropriate changes to the engine management software (it overboosts the turbo for more torque, tightens the steering and gives faster throttle response in Sport, for example).


The QV takes this to a whole new level, incorporating Alfa's new active suspension into the DNA system. While it uses the standard steel springs, it boasts five body sensors to figure out what's going on, then adds a new active shock absorber. This has continuously variable damping, so it can change the tuning of the shock to tweak the suspension to suit the road conditions.


The result is a MiTo corners with barely a hint of body roll and one in which you find yourself attacking corners with more and more aggression in search of the limits of its turn-in grip. And then, when you find them, they're easy to fix as the electronic "diff" comes in to direct power to the outside wheel and the car emerges gleefully out the other side.


The car becomes even better in a series of corners, with none of the MiTo's tendencies to rear-steering or lots of roll at the rear. It just flicks from one corner to the next and asks for more. It helps that the QV's 17-inch tyres are one size up from the standard car, but it's clear that the system really works -- at least on the confines of Alfa's Balocco test facility.


Depending on price when it makes Aussie shores, this should be the MiTo to have -- it's easily the best example of the breed to date.


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Written byMichael Taylor
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