Wrongness in the pursuit of profit - Alfa Romeo SUV

Maybe I'm just weird but I felt sad seeing this in my facebook feed, I know there's so much money in SUVs, and Maserati has one along with Jaguar, but damn... an Alfa should be small and red or yellow with a beautifully sounding petrol engine and a manual box. When BMW made SUVs I was disappointed, when BMW made that front wheel drive 2-series "active touring" thing I just pretended it didn't exist, I tried to just imagine it was a Mini with a badging mistake. When a neighbour owned an automatic Alfa 159 diesel that sounded like a bag of nails in a cement mixer and had an auto box I felt saddened that modern Alfa's came in such needlessly sensible combinations but still the Brera was so pretty and they made the 4C so I can forgive that and put it down to the owner's poor choices.

But it just looks so wrong seeing an Alfa Romeo badge and grille on a minivan/SUV thing. How do you preserve any of what makes an Alfa special that high above the ground, in a car that big and that cumbersome, with a 2.0L diesel engine.

I got to grow up watching dad come home from work in mum's Alfa Sprint, bouncing of the limiter in second on the hill up to our house and I always loved them as that lightweight, highly strung loveable little Italian sports car and it seems like such a long time ago that they made them like that 🙁

I've long since given up on hysteria over SUVs. A couple reasons why, despite the fact that I genuinely don't really care for any of them anyhow:

-The Maserati SUV (forget what it's called) is by all accounts quite well engineered, at least by the US car magazines... handles well, has a nice engine note, so at least it's somewhat worthy of the name....
-The forthcoming Lamborghini SUV will not be the first from the brand, as we all know, and I don't recall any hand-wringing over the LM002 when it was introduced more than 30 years ago....

And my personal favorite, the original 2002 Porsche Cayenne Turbo. Faster at the time than most sportscars at or below its price point, better offroad than anything this side of a Hummer H1. When Porsche announced the Cayenne, I lost it like everyone else. When it actually arrived, it was so quintessentially Porsche in its ruthless efficiency in everything it might ever be potentially asked to do, it was impossible not to respect the hell out of it and of Porsche for doing it. That, and the fact that it saved the brand financially and is almost single-handedly responsible for the fact that we are still able to buy 911s and the fact that Porsche is back winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans (whether they do this year remains to be seen though!)