Group test: Alfa Giulia vs BMW three Series vs Jaguar XE

If you like driving, make one of these your next company car

Through the sharpest part of Hammerhead. Acute left, wind off the lock, a touch of throttle, acute right. And… stop. Crimson light. Stir away, avoid the bus coming in from the left. Check over the shoulder, edge alongside a white van. Big pothole now.

You might argue that taking a bunch of diesel saloons and sending them around our famous figure-of-eight test track is about the most pointless thing we could have done to vehicles whose purpose in life is mostly business travel and family life. Joy, but pointless. But when done at a suitably ambitious scale, we can bring you some actual Top Gear consumer advice. What scale? About 140:1.

This feature originally appeared in the May two thousand seventeen issue of Top Gear magazine.

Yes, if you multiply the Top Gear test track by 140, then lay the resulting form on the road network of the East Midlands, what emerges is a stern and relevant test for sporty diesel saloons. It’s got all the stuff a company-car drone needs to do: m’way and city and suburban. We’ll come to that, but forgive us for having some good times very first. Because the commence/finish line is on a string of Wolds roads around Gainsborough. They weave and buck, at times throwing us sets of clear-sighted 90° leans. Little traffic. A good place to be driving.

They’ll expose the character of taut-sinewed cars from Alfa, BMW and Jaguar. We have sport suspensions and optional adaptive dampers on all three, and the most powerful Two.0-litre diesel options, with automatics. BMW and Jaguar suggest AWD, but here we’ve kept it even with rear-drive in all cars.

The Alfa gobbles it up. Maybe because there’s something about these surfaces that’s not unlike Italian roads, or maybe because it’s a good car everywhere, but that’s a question for later today. For now let’s love its unflappable, solid, crisp moves. It’s tautly suspended, so its assets moves up and down a bit, but always snappily damped. The steering is a remarkable thing: the highest-geared set-up of the three cars, matched to a chassis that doesn’t roll and carves quickly into every turn. But while so many such quick set-ups can feel twitchy on roads like this (Ferrari) or bashed up with endless lateral deflection (Concentrate RS, we mean you), the Alfa’s steering matches its agility with tranquil.

Its tyres find vast grip, and there’s a limited-slip diff as part of a spectacle pack with those adaptive dampers. It’s unusual – however if we’re being fair, adequate – to find the traction control can’t be fully switched off, and even in its looser setting in Dynamic mode, it’ll still cut the engine a little out of a slow corner. While I’m being picky, its steering doesn’t yield as much feel as the BMW’s. But the Giulia’s agility and precision give it a terrific authority over the bumps and arches.

After which, the BMW’s chassis feels old. On uneven roads its suspension shuffles uneasily, knocking from side to side, pitching diagonally. The wheels seem stronger than the Alfa’s, the suspension corded up by more friction. Even tho’ the springs aren’t meaningfully firmer, there’s more general commotion. Can this be the saloon that’s been held in such universal high regard for so darned long? Oh yes, and here’s why. Find a slick corner, a big roundabout, a spiralling dual-carriageway slip road, pitch it in and the entire thing hunkers down, the steering alive with feel, the car glad to balance on its traction.

Funny, but when you drive a Jaguar XE alongside an Audi A4, you think it’s acute as a tack and super-engaging. But alongside the Alfa and BMW, its proposition slips off to a different, more isolated territory. Like them, its responses to the steering are lithe and gorgeously balanced, but unlike them it spares you the details. The rail is notably more placid even in its Sport mode (I always kept the Alfa’s and BMW’s dampers in their softer mode on these hectic surfaces). And its steering operates on a need-to-know basis. You can zip serenely along these difficult roads, but because it robs you of information about the friction below, you don’t feel decently involved. Nor actually any too certain when springtime turns back to winter, as it did in our test.

BMW’s old Two.0-litre diesel drove as well as most people’s fresh ones, but this 320d’s fresh B-series is keener again. If Otto hadn’t invented the petrol engine, you’d have every right to be chuffed with driving the 320d. It revs close to Five,000rpm and doesn’t have any substantially soggy catches sight of. Even if it did, the superb calibration of the auto ’box would cover them up.

The Alfa’s powertrain comes close – it doesn’t rev so high and the noise is a little tinkly at times, but the engine and transmission work well together and your by hand activated shifts, via the gorgeous alloy bull-horn paddles, click through crisply.

There’s been enough criticism of the Jaguar Ingenium engine’s racket – grumbly on the motorway, harsh under big fountains – that I won’t dwell on it, save to say it very likely wouldn’t be a gigantic issue if the auto ’box were better set up. This is the same ZF unit as the others, but the Jaguar permits mushy torque-converter slip at low revs, encouraging you to open up your toe to get activity, at which point the engine comes on boost, the transmission kicks down, the lock-up engages and you crash forward far more aggressively than you wished. It’s a passing irritation as we go through country towns, an actual annoyance as we hit the stop-go gloop of the Brum metropolis.

On the motorway sections, the Jaguar’s lush rail and quiet tyres are soothing. Less so is the need for a lot of steering correction to hold it inbetween lane markers. The BMW’s tyres roar and its steering, however it holds straight well, has inconsistent weighting in the very first few degrees of lock. So the Alfa is easiest to guide, and its road and wind noise split the other two. So it’s the best cruiser, which is fairly something, given it’s also the best on B-roads.

The BMW’s suspension keeps writhing and clumping after Spaghetti Junction and into the city. The Alfa is just as stiffly sprung but its figure motions are neater, restricted mostly to a vertical axis, so they impinge less on your own skeleton. The Jaguar is the decently cushy one.

But I’d only be loving the Jag’s isolation if it had the optional seats. The test car has the standard ones without adjustable lumbar support, and their hollow form gives me backache. It’s individual of course, but generally my spine isn’t fussy: most car chairs are fine by me. Neither would I want to be stuck in the back of the Jaguar, because the slinky roof cuts headroom. That doesn’t actually matter because no one buys this sort of car as a five-seater. It’s all SUVs these days, innit?

So the Alfa has consistently shown up well in the characteristics required for this varied journey, and if that surprises you then you’ll have breath bated for this, its last chance to let itself down. The interior. But no. It’s not just stylish but cleanly and sensibly laid out and decently constructed. The seat is good, and its relationship with steering wheel and pedals is ideally cordial. The instruments are clear and the infotainment unambitious but pretty effortless to operate. This Giulia Super trim level gets standard TomTom mapping with connected traffic. It’s a match for Jaguar’s and BMW’s standard systems, however the test 320d and XE have optional extras the Alfa doesn’t suggest: bigger-screen, more connected navigation, and head-up displays.

OK, I got upset that the Alfa’s map autorotates to heading up when you zoom in beyond a immovable threshold, but I know most don’t share that tic of mine. More of a bother is the lack of CarPlay and Android Auto, albeit traditional phone over Bluetooth and music over USB works well enough. Ditto the Jaguar. The BMW doesn’t have total CarPlay, but it does have Siri, which is very handy for summoning music, voice-dialling or dictating texts.

The BMW’s driving position is fine, but does it need this thick soggy wheel rim? It’s like grappling with a Krispy Kreme. On the upside, almost twenty years of continually evolving iDrive has turned the BMW’s infotainment into a model of clarity, configurability and ease. To be fair, this is the top-end optional system, but it repays your investment. So does the brilliant HUD, with its acute rendering and superb context-dependent content. By default it shows speed plus the distance to your next junction, but touch the steering-wheel phone button and that arrow is temporarily substituted by your latest calls list so you can scroll through and redial without looking down. Same with music: touch the roller and up comes a list of tracks or stations. Genius.

The Jaguar too has an optional HUD, but it’s less informative, and its gritty orange graphics look like the motorway gantry signs that tell you there’s an hour’s delay ahead. Our test XE had the optional big-screen navigation, which looks swish but gives you less control over presentation than the BMW. There are more infelicities in the XE’s cabin design. Pulling onto the M1, I opened the boot instead of activating the lane-departure warning because those two buttons are hidden below the steering column, adjacent and haptically matched. What were they thinking of?

The Jaguar’s capability to slip like a swan over difficult roads, and its surprising agility while it’s at it, is unmatched in cars this size. But there are too many other let-downs: powertrain, ergonomics and puffy-cloud steering.

Even so, it manages to make the 320d feel like an old car that’s been very cleverly updated by its perfected engine and iDrive. The BMW’s lumpy chassis has always been given an effortless break in road tests because there was no rival that made such a excellent job of cornering on slick roads. And actually there still isn’t.

But away from that one circumstance, the Alfa is more satisfying and engaging to drive quickly. It makes a pretty clean sweep of the day-to-day hygiene factors too. Alfa has come straight out of the slot with a car that doesn’t just make splashy headlines with its tyre-shredding 500bhp version. The majority-selling diesel Giulia is a very first effort that feels like Alfa has been doing it for years. Given the strength in depth of the opposition – in this test and elsewhere – a car’s got to be a winner when it excels at the diverse requests of our super-sized Hammerhead, Go after Through and Gambon.

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