Byron runs down the new interior features in the 2020 Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio
Transcript- Hey, everybody, it's Byron. Welcome to another short cut here with the 2020 Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio. There's lots of Gs. They've updated this car for the new model year with some new interior appointments, an updated touchscreen infotainment system, yes, touch screen, and just some kind of like quality of life improvements, if you will.
Of course, I'm sitting in a 500 horsepower sports sedan in my garage with the engine off, because I want to tell you how fast it is. No, we're going to look at the new infotainment system today. This is something that Alfa took a lot of heat for when the car was first released, because they did the whole thing from the ground up, and it frankly wasn't very good. The interface was clunky. The system wasn't very responsive.
So with the new model, in addition to all of these other little bits, they've completely overhauled this infotainment cluster. So I was just going to kind of give you guys a quick look at this today, cycle through a few of the features. Just kind of show you how it works, and see if they've actually managed to improve it at all.
So what we're seeing here is the home screen. Right now, it's showing just two panels. The touch screen is nice. It's always welcome. It's one of those things where when you have it, it feels like a distraction, and when you don't have it, its absence is glaring.
This implementation, it's an Alfa, we'll put it that way. The display looks good. The resolution is not spectacular. It's an 8.8 inch screen. It doesn't really look it because of the way it's been integrated into the dash here.
It seems to cut into a lot of the real estate, although you can see the borders of it actually only extend about that far. The screen is not terribly responsive, as you can see while I scroll through here, but it does place a lot of information right at your fingertips. Most of it is physically, for lack of a better word, in the same place it was in the prior car, they've just made it accessible via the touch rather than simply using the little rotary doohickey.
The real beef I have with it is probably the responsiveness. As I scroll through, I'm imagining myself driving along and trying to find something by quickly glancing down. I don't think that's going to happen very easily. The good news is that it doesn't seem to require a whole lot of effort to find what you're looking for when you are paying attention.
So as I go through these, if I want to look at the driver assistance features, I tap on it. And now I've got this menu here that I can scroll through. As you can see, still not incredibly responsive, but there is a whole lot going on here. They've got all these graphics on the right side. All these little descriptions, tool tips, if you will, to kind of give you an idea of what it is you're scrolling through at a glance, which is handy, especially because we only have a glance most of the time.
As you can see, when I go back to the home screen and get the panels back, again, a little sluggish. We have these because it's a Quadrifoglio, we have all of the performance gauges and all of that. We'll be making good use of those later on this week, as we get more chance to drive this.
Connected services, vehicle settings, everything's here. It's nice having a very simple, broad, high level main menu that lets you drill down really quickly, because quickly is everything when you're talking about a vehicle interface. So I'm going to bring up the navigation screen here, just to show you guys that.
As we go through, some of these things, again, the loading times aren't ideal. It actually takes a little bit longer for the system to boot up than I would like. And as you can see, when you're on the home screen here, these tiles can be resized, just in case you want to have more than one thing open, but there's something that's more important than something else. In this case, let's say navigation. I can grow that to a slightly larger size.
It fills a 16 by 9 area, and gives me a better overall look at my map and my current location, just to kind of get my bearings a little bit better. This is true of most of these, not all. Some of them do not have this. You can see the phone option doesn't, the driver's systems, on, and on, and on. All of these are meant to be opened up in their own window and utilized that way.
The other cool thing is so obviously, you can expand it to fit the larger part of the screen, 2/3 of it, or you can just click on it, and have it fill the entire screen. Flexibility is nice. The responsiveness may not be ideal, but it's not a terrible system. So while this does have a touch screen now, they haven't fully abandoned the rotary control knob. It's still here.
I can still cycle through. You can see that it adds a little red border around each frame as I cycle through. This is far more responsive than the touch screen itself is. So that's a plus to using it, and a little easier to use because as you're driving along, you can glance very briefly, and the huge red outline tells you exactly what's going on.
So you can cycle through knowing, oh, the selection I want is to the right, to the right, to the right. Fine, I found it, click, without actually looking at the screen. Everything that I need, all of the feedback I need, comes from my peripheral vision, which is much better than trying to do this, because once you're doing this, your eyes are going where your finger goes.
It's impossible to guide yourself otherwise. It's a fact of life. There are even buttons on the flanks of it that allow you to quickly access settings or the home screen, which is great, especially because you can do it again without looking.
I've got the center console lid open here because I'm looking at some of the other things that were added to this car. So we have the 8.8 inch touchscreen navigation system. This one also has the full digital cluster. I believe that's a 7 inch full color display.
Right now, it's showing me the navigation, which is mirrored from the infotainment center. Back here we've got regular USB type-A, auxiliary input, and USB type-C, which FCA has been adding pretty much across its lineup. It was added to the Wrangler when it was redesigned for 2018, et cetera.
The materials on the steering wheel have been improved. The bezels are new. The leather stitching goes all the way down to the base. It doesn't have that plastic layer to it that created a seam that ran the circumference of the bottom of the wheel.
All in all, it feels more luxurious. The carbon fiber trim down here looks great. The wireless cell phone charging cubby here inside the lid, but accessible from outside of it, very nice.
I also like the other things they've added behind the scenes here. There's now a Wi-Fi hotspot available. They've also added over the air firmware updates, hint, those two are related. There are just a lot of things that have been added that make the experience of owning this car just a little bit easier.
It's Italian. It's going to be finicky. That's kind of part of the deal, but it's nice to have things, like the hotspot, and the over the air updates, and an app that now has a companion app that you can use, which again, feeds into the Wi-Fi hotspot in the over the air updates, because it all uses the same antennas, and the same effective hardware in order to work. So now you can remote lock and unlock, check different things about the car, keep updated on it, get service reminders, all that kind of stuff right on your phone, and without having to get into the car.
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