It's probably worth pointing out that Alfa Romeo made 3 major revisions of this model during it's lifetime and these revisions included safety upgrades among others. Basically they constantly kept improving cars characteristics. Mostly due to poor frontal impact score in EuroNcap safety testing in 2003 they strengthened car against frontal impact (change in frontal pylon design and metal area around dash and engine). Of course probably due to cost concerns they didn't bother doing another round of testing. Anyways, car's after 2004 should theoretically perform much better in frontal impact.