Premium production for Tonale

Alfa Romeo crossover gets rebuilt plant with new machines, tools and quality checks

- HILTON HOLLOWAY

If a Romeo CEO Jean Philippe Imparato was on the fighting form when we met him at the new facility that's ramping up to full-scale production of the Tonale crossover. "It's worldclass everything: a premium plant for premium products," he pithily summarised.

Imparato was extremely keen to deliver his message that the Tonale is unlike any past Alfa, thanks to hitherto unseen levels of deeply rooted quality and precision assembly.

The Giambattista Vico plant part of the Pomigliano d'Arco facility near Naples that makes the Fiat Panda - is effectively all-new, with only "the shape of building remaining".

Alfa's historic reputational issues were clearly at the front of Imparato's mind during our tour of the plant, which was in its final day of pre-production mode, carefully assembling just 15 Tonales per day.

Alfa has specially selected 425 workers - those who are "proud to be part of the tribe" - and they've undergone a collective 19,000 hours of training for building Tonales.

One of the training stations shows workers how to correctly clip together the wide range of electrical connectors in the car. It's no good Alfa having monthly meetings with suppliers to ensure the consistent components quality of when the fault is actually a badly fitted clip.

The production lines are new from the ground up. Imparato said all the workstations have been redesigned to make the assembly process easier, while new tools have been designed to enable a "precise and methodical job".

The new plant, which Alfa would only say cost "hundreds of millions", has a substantially electrified production line, so it's much quieter than before. It has also been designed to be much more pleasant to work in.