2024 Alfa Romeo Tonale

The verdict:  Stylish, luxurious, and excellent to drive, Alfa Romeo has successfully created with the Tonale an entry-level SUV with more mass appeal to get new buyers into its showrooms.

Versus the competition: The Tonale has more personality than any of its competitors, including the Lexus UX and Audi Q3, and a more luxurious (but not more spacious) interior and spunky driving performance that’s in keeping with the brand’s sporty image.

If we’re being perfectly honest here, there isn’t much difference in the way many compact luxury SUVs feel. Vehicles such as the Audi Q3, BMW X1, Land Rover Range Rover Evoque and Lexus UX are all largely woven from the same cloth: Take a front-wheel-drive car platform, beef it up a bit, give it a tall body with tidy proportions, and wrap it in brand-specific styling that varies from mundane to quirky. They all tend to be easy-driving, not-too-sporty, highly approachable entry-level models that are meant to bring people into the brand and lock them in for life down a path of larger (and increasingly expensive) models as a customer moves through various stages of affluence. But missing from this list of brands, at least in the U.S., has been anything Italian — until now.

The newest member of the Alfa Romeo family is this, the 2024 Tonale. That’s “toe-nah-lay,” not “toenail” (c’mon, people). It comes to us via Italy through the Stellantis pantheon of brands, which includes more than a dozen global nameplates and includes everything that used to be part of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles as well as a number of others that might surprise you (French Citroen, British Vauxhall, German Opel).

The Tonale is notable for a few reasons: It’s a small, front-drive compact crossover that’s been on sale in Europe for less than a year now but is just arriving on our shores. It shares a lot of its underbits with the new Dodge Hornet and even the Jeep Compass. Second, it will only be offered here in one version: an all-wheel-drive plug-in hybrid, making it also the first Alfa Romeo to feature a plug. It can supposedly drive more than 30 miles on all-electric power before its tiny turbocharged gas engine kicks in.

Unlike a lot of Alfa Romeo’s products, this one has a slightly different focus, according to the company. It’s aimed at drawing in women buyers — and that’s reflected in the choices the brand has made regarding how the Tonale drives. It’s not a super sports machine like the Giulia sedan or the Stelvio SUV, nor the hairy-edge-of-sports-car-life like the now-discontinued 4C coupe. It’s a softer, friendlier Alfa Romeo meant to stand out in a crowded field with its Italian style, swank interior fittings and reasonable price.