Alpine A390 GTS (2026 - ) Electric review

There are plenty of performance SUVs – sorry, Alpine, we mean 'performance sporting fastbacks' – out there, but not all of them purely battery powered. This makes the Alpine A390 GTS one of the most affordable vehicles of its type to run, although it is priced robustly enough that the superb Porsche Macan Electric appears firmly in its crosshairs. Nevertheless, owners who have home-charging points and low overnight energy tariffs won’t be able to run something this fast much cheaper than this.

Alpine’s parent company Renault has made great strides in quality control and reliability over recent times. Not only that, the A390 shares its platform with lots of Renault products and, because it’s an EV, there’s even less to go wrong than usual. Also, Alpine’s standard warranty is for three years and up to 100,000 miles, but this can be extended to seven years if needs be – providing full peace of mind for a potential owner.

Euro NCAP has already tested the Alpine A390, and it achieved a four-star rating, rather than the full five partly because of a less-than-stellar adult occupant protection score of 74 per cent. That said, there are a lot of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) across the range and four stars is still a decent performance, so it should be more than safe enough for family drivers.

The Alpine A110 sports car is fabled for the floaty-light way it went down the road – behaviour completely at odds with stereotype of rock hard suspension only too common in many of its key rivals. To an extent, you can feel this delicate character in the way the A390 covers lumps in the Tarmac, but it can sometimes crash and bang a little too much on poorer surfaces. Still, there’s a good amount of space in the cabin and the bucket seats up front are beautifully supportive, so for something so sporty the A390 has admirable levels of overall comfort.

The main problem for the Alpine A390 GTS is the existence of the Alpine A390 GT. Well-equipped though the GTS is, aside from some extra carbon-fibre trim in the cabin, it doesn’t have any extra equipment over and above the existing model – so you’re paying a premium purely for the added performance, rather than any uprated ambience of the interior.

The main talking point of the GTS is a modest hike in the outputs of its three electric motors, with one on the front axle and two situated at the rear. Now, the A390 GT is hardly a slow car as it is, but Alpine has given the GTS a shot in the arm good enough to trim nearly a second off the 0-62mph time and reduce it to a supercar-like 3.9 seconds. Allied to the superb chassis of the Alpine fastback and its clever torque-vectoring tech – a fancy way of saying it has mega handling – then the increase in speed makes the A390 GTS feel like a much more worthy match for Porsche’s pesky Macan Electric.