Features

This, by all accounts, is a good-looking car. It certainly has some serious kerbside appeal - front three-quarter is a particularly good angle - with six lamps flanking the pointy nose doing sterling work of making the family Alfa face look suitably peeved, and a great swathe of glass sheathing the roof like a slicked-back haircut.

The rear is just as nice; a pert bum made up of softly rounded-out triangular shapes in the rear windscreen and lamp clusters (which echo the front lamps by having three circular inserts in each side), all hunkered down atop four exhaust tips, which appear on every model.

Can't help thinking that's good news for basemodel buyers, but slightly less attractive if you've gone for the £30k V6 Q4, though. Another small gripe is that you can see straight down the pipes when you're following the Brera, and therefore see that these aren't actually four pipes - just one each side that splits to form the tips.

Dead-side profile is where this looks a little too much like a hatchback and a little more lumpen - the fussy 18-inch wheels on our test car not helping to clean up the lines. The grey skies of the UK also make it hard to pick out the subtleties of the body.

The colour is electric blue, but this is what happens to fancy hues when Britain forgets to put money in the meter - something worth remembering when picking your personal colour palette.

The fact remains that Alfa has again scored points with proper mass appeal. Lots of people are genuinely taking a good hard look at this car - and not in the same way they do with a supercar when they don't want to give the driver the satisfaction. They look at this like they do at new versions of mass market cars, with hunger instead of jealousy - which must be music to Alfa Romeo's ears.

It helps that this engine has the Brera cracking along at a decent pace, with 200bhp and 295lb ft making motorways an easy place to cruise. It's not startlingly fast from the line: 0-62mph in 8.1 seconds won't exactly melt the tarmac, but it might bruise it a bit.

The six-speed gearbox is pretty good - not the quickest ever, but the clutch take-up and gearbox springing make it easy to drive. A top end of 142mph is plenty. I say plenty, because although the ride quality cleans up its act on the motorway, on smaller roads, the Brera feels like a boat. This is not praise.