Well, these are two pretty similar cars we have here! It's only details that could potentially make the difference. Considering they both belong to the large family car segment and utilize the same 4-door sedan body style and the front wheel drive system, it all comes up to the specific petrol engine choice they offer. The first one has a Alfa Romeo-engineered powertrain under the hood, a 6-cylinder, 24-valves 250hp unit, while the other one gets its power and torque from a 4-cylinder, 16-valves 190hp engine designed by Honda.

The fact that the Honda got tested by the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP), while the other contender didn't, offers a slight advantage, as the 4-star rating is better than none. Still, apart from the official crash test results there are other things we need to be aware of. Both vehicles belong to the large family car segment, which is generally a good thing safety-wise, but it doesn't do much to help us decide between the two. Furthermore, taking kerb weight as an important factor into account, the Italian car offers a marginal difference of 2% more metal.

Reliability is not the best thing to consider on the make level, but it is worth mentioning that Honda presents an order of magnitude better choice, at least on all of the models level. That's the official data, while our visitors describe reliability of Alfa Romeo with an average rating of 4.2, and models under the Honda badge with 4.7 out of 5. The same official information place 156 as average reliability-wise, and Accord is more or less at the same level.That apart, owners of different cars powered by the same engine as the Italian car rank it on average as 5.0, while the one under the competitor's bonnet gets 4.9 out of 5.

Alfa Romeo is undoubtly more agile, reaching 100km/h in 1.6 seconds less than its competitor. In addition to that it accelerates all the way to 250 kilometers per hour, 23km/h more than the other car. When it comes to fuel economy an obvious choice would be the Japanese car, averaging around 9 liters of fuel per 100 kilometers (31 mpg), in combined cycle. That's 34% difference compared to the Italian car!

Honda appears just a bit more reliable, although the difference is truly marginal. The most important thing when deciding between any two vehicles should always be safety, both passive and active. In my opinion, everything taken into account, the Japanese car offers much better overall protection, which launches it ahead of the other contender. From there things take a different direction, with Alfa Romeo being considerably quicker, thus putting more smile on driver's face. It does come at a cost though, and that's the fuel consumption... All together, there's not much more to say, in this case I wouldn't even consider anything but Honda. In any case that's my personal view, built upon all the data available to me. What should decide here though is the way you feel about the two vehicles, and I hope you'll find my guidelines useful in the process. In case you have two minutes to spare I invite you to define your needs, desires and budget and see which car would be chosen by the virtual adviser™, among more than 12.000 different ones in our database.