Alpine – turning petrolheads electric

It’s been a challenge facing all ‘legacy’ carmakers, especially those with reputations built on petrol-powered sports cars. But one Alpine is now grappling with, as it develops products to bring traditional fans along for the ride in the switch from combustion engines to electric motors. We see similar transitions happening at different speeds across what we might consider petrolhead brands, be that Porsche, BMW and AMG all the way up to the supercar superstars like Ferrari, Lamborghini and McLaren. Stirring it all up are pure electric brands like Rimac and BYD, the latter fresh from claiming the title of world’s fastest production car from none other than Bugatti.
So, how is Alpine going about it? We spent a day out with its cars to find out…

Alpine has come a long way from roots as a passion project for a motorsport mad car dealer from a coastal town in Northern France, who was so fired up by his rallying exploits in the faraway mountains he decided to call his fledgling car brand ‘Alpine’ in tribute. Which is exactly what Jean Rédélé did, the regular Renaults he tuned up for his racing forming the basis for an entire business, and a dedicated factory to build them in his hometown of Dieppe.

That link with the French brand has always been strong, Rédélé starting out modifying models for racing before creating his own delicate little sports cars powered by Renault engines. These evolved into the iconic A110, a plastic-bodied giant killer whose lack of weight and nimble handling turned into a rally winner and Alpine’s signature road-going model. The brand was also busy on the track, its wild looking racing cars competing at Le Mans and, if not fighting for top honours, typically successful in the Index of Performance and Energy Index classes promoting efficiency and aerodynamic innovation. The overall victory did eventually come in 1978, Renault having taken a controlling stake in the company in the years previous.
The dream of being ‘the French Porsche’ continued through the 70s, 80s and 90s with a succession of quirky, Renault-based sports cars that had their fans but never really lived up to the ambition, the Dieppe factory and its expert workforce turning its talents to building hot Clios, Meganes and Twingos under the Renaultsport brand. Then, in 2018, the A110 was reborn. And Alpine was back.

The modern-day A110 was styled in tribute to the original, and successfully reimagined its talents for a new era. Like before, it combined an everyday Renault engine, weight saving and sharp handling to great effect, successfully proving there was more to making cars fast and fun than outright horsepower. It was such a breath of fresh air it even won over supercar owners with collections of much more powerful and expensive exotics, who were happy to park an A110 among them.
The A110 has been made faster and more exotic, and has effectively carried the brand thus far while entry into F1 and a presence in videogames like Gran Turismo have helped build the brand’s name among a generation raised on Drive To Survive and e-sports.

And it’s now going electric, the A290 hot-hatch based on the hugely acclaimed Renault 5 in a battery-powered twist on Alpine’s origins. Being based on the electric car of the moment doesn’t do the A290 any harm but, along with the Peugeot e-208 GTI, Alfa Romeo Junior Veloce and others it's spearheading a new generation of electric hot-hatches poised to capture the imagination of fast car fans who never grew up driving petrol-powered hot hatches or coupes. Smart move. But like the A110 the A290 is also winning over trad petrolheads, and joining collections of faster, more expensive and more glamorous sports cars for the simple fact it looks cool and is great fun to drive.

Well, there’s an all-electric A110 on the way, which we’ll be seeing soon. But before we get to that Alpine is, perhaps inevitably, expanding its range to include a sporty crossover. It’s called the A390, and while the ghost of Jean Rédélé might shudder at the fact it’s literally double the weight of an A110 it’s got the performance to honour his legacy. Not to mention the tech.
There will be two versions – a 400 horsepower GT and a 470 horsepower GTS – and both promise supercar levels of acceleration. That’s nothing out of the ordinary in the electric car world of course, but the A390 also has some very clever tech to make it handle like Alpines of old. Even if it’s much bigger, taller and heavier.

This includes an innovative arrangement of a single motor driving the front wheels and two motors at the back, one for each of the rear wheels. It’s not the first time this has been done – Tesla has used a similar arrangement on the Model S Plaid, for instance. But for all Tesla’s talent it doesn’t have decades of motorsport experience behind it. Or an F1 team. And this expertise is being channelled into the way the two rear motors can be tuned to work independently and actually push the car into the turns via a system called Alpine Active Torque Vectoring. Again, it’s not the first to use this kind of tech. But its appearance in a family-friendly crossover like the A390 will hopefully set it apart in a crowded market of similar looking rivals. We’ll be driving it soon to see if it works as promised. A version of the same tech has also been teased in a wild, A290-based concept channelling the history of the mad, wide-body Renault 5 Turbo rallied in the early 80s.
In the grand scheme of things Alpine remains a small, specialist brand fuelled by petrolhead passion. But its journey to electric is an interesting demonstration of how you can bring fans along for the ride. Dreams of being the French Porsche may still be a long way off. But it’s doing more than most to prove electric cars can be just as exciting as what went before.