WEIGHT EXPECTATIONS

Car makers are having to go all-electric, which is some challenge for brands built on light and lithe cars. Sam Phillips heads to France to find out how Alpine will stay true to its founding ethos and run the rule over its electrified A110 concept

- Sam Phillips

Every great sports car has at least one outstanding characteristic, an attribute that makes driving it that bit sweeter. For the Alpine A110, everything stems from its lightweight.

Alpine returned to the market with the A110 six years ago, and this was instantly heralded as one of the best sports cars of its generation, including earning a five-star rating from Autocar’s road testers.

Since then, the one-car French firm owned by Renault and led by Laurent Rossi has established itself as a serious player in the performance car scene and started racing in both the World Endurance Championship and Formula 1.

Now for the next step, as Alpine transforms itself into an electric-only brand over the next three years, with three all-new EVs arriving by 2026: a hot hatchback based on the new Renault 5 supermini, a coupécrossover called the GT X-Over and a successor to the A110 (promisingly being developed in partnership with Lotus).

This grand plan seems to have a conflict at its very heart: the petrol-engined A110 tips the scales at just 1120kg but batteries are heavy, so embracing electrification puts the very essence of Alpine at risk. And this budding brand simply can’t afford to abandon its philosophy.

As a sign of just how significant this risk is, the boffins in Dieppe have already given us a taste of the future in the form of the A110 E-ternité concept car, an electrified version of today's A110. Revealed last year, it was created to serve as a test bed for future technology.

"The E-ternité, as a first draft, is actually almost as efficient as the ICE car, albeit slightly heavier, but it had better torque and was not too far away in terms of weight distribution," explains Rossi.