Mario Lamagna wants to build electric cars that people can love. Seems like a tall order, doesn’t it, but he’s the product manager at Alfa Romeo, so if anyone can come up with the goods it’s him.
But that’s the challenge for a storied company like Alfa moving into the electric realm – combustion engines have always been an analogue for personality and emotion.
“If you are buying an Alfa, you are someone who is falling in love with the car they’re buying. And with the Junior we wanted to enlarge our customer base,” Lamagna says. “Everyone knows Alfa Romeo in the car world, but I’d love to see us have more visibility beyond that – we believe that each one of us has a small Alfista soul inside, you just have to discover it. That doesn't mean that Alfa Romeo is for everyone, but it can be for anyone.”
We spoke to Lamagna at the recent Brussels motor show, with the company unveiling an ultra exclusive special edition Giulia Quadrifoglio with a rorty V6 engine and lots of Italian pedigree, while at the same time the outfit was preparing to hawk some of its small electric SUVs to Belgian showgoers.
There must be a tension there, right? Lamagna thinks the two can sit side by side. “Our asset has to be our roots and our DNA. We are really serious about our DNA – we are sporty, we are Italian, we are red, we are full of passion. There are many different brands around now without a history, without an innate appeal. We want to stay true to our roots, but always innovating.”
And the Junior is the evidence of that innovation, the first electric Alfa Romeo. “Last year, we launched the Junior Veloce [the range-topping performance model in the Junior line-up], and it was our statement to the world," Lamagna tells us. "Our brief at the time to the engineers was that we wanted an analogue electric car. So the Veloce has a mechanical limited slip differential, it has very sporty brakes with a slightly different regeneration strategy in Sport mode that targets more performance rather than pure regeneration. It was our answer to those who say that electric cars are just smartphones with wheels.”
Which brings up another challenge in the electric age, which is that every EV now comes with bags of power thanks to the nature of electric motors. So a performance brand has to work a little harder. “Everyone has power now with electric, so we wanted the car to drive well,” explains Lamagna. “Many of the electric cars on the road feel like there’s a filter between you and the road, so the interfaces are the first thing to look at. The steering and the brakes. We also benchmark our electric cars against petrol cars – that’s the key, you don’t car that it’s electric, it has to drive well. From a sports car design viewpoint, for me electric is just the technology of the powertrain.”
It’s been a recent criticism too of the Stellantis Group that too much is being shared between the brands within it, but Lamagna says that he’s not worried. “It's good thing for everyone that we have more kilometres run to test the quality of the cars, that we have better economies of scale,” he says. “There’s no added value to the customer to have different bits of software or components just for the sake of being a different brand.” But, he adds, there’s also a lot of unseen work going on behind the scenes to make sure that brands can differentiate themselves properly.
And does Lamagna think that electric Alfas will be a tough sell? “I’m a real petrolhead, so when I first started to drive electric cars I was not interested, but then I realised that for a given purpose electric cars are really perfect. Full stop. So for me the key is that people have to go to the showrooms and try electric cars out.”
The Junior Veloce is in fact great fun to drive, just don't expect it to do much for your range 
