Alfa Romeo Milano Electric SUV is now the Alfa Romeo Junior

Less than a week after Alfa Romeo revealed the new electric SUV – the Alfa Romeo Milano – its name has been changed to the Alfa Romeo Junior.

Last week, the arrival of the new Alfa Romeo Milano signalled Alfa’s return to the compact market – and the hope of big sales – as they took the underpinning of cars like the Jeep Avenger and Fiat 600e and sprinkled some Alfa fairy dust to create an appealing compact electric SUV.

But no sooner had Alfa rolled out the Milano when an Italian government official declared it was illegal to use the Milano name for a car that would be built in Poland.

That is clearly not something Alfa’s customers care about as the name was chosen by public vote but, despite believing the government official’s declaration is wrong, Alfa has decided to be pragmatic and has changed the Milano’s name – it’s now the Alfa Romeo Junior. 

Jean-Philippe Imparato, Alfa Romeo CEO, said:

We decided to change the name, even though we know that we are not required to do so, because we want to preserve the positive emotion that our products have always generated and avoid any type of controversy. The attention to our new sports compact that we’ve received the past few days is quite exciting as we had an unprecedented number of visits to the online configurator, causing the website to crash for a couple hours.