2 days ago
Alpine A290: an EV that will have you smiling and giggling on almost every drive
Technology divides us. The glowing oblong abyss that stares back at us from our palms is locking us into place, forcing us to follow the algorithm rather than our hearts.
It makes us mute, sponges for content rather than people who share ideas and talk to one another. It has replaced our memories with a Google search.
You are, presumably, reading this very piece on a phone, or a tablet, or maybe a laptop, and I'm grateful that you are. But I wish you were reading it as ink on paper, and maybe looking up from it to share your reaction to it with a friend.
Tech, then, is a generally a bad thing. Perhaps the original French 'saboteurs' – who in legend, if not quite in fact, threw their wooden shoes, sabots, into newfangled machines that were taking away their livelihoods – had the right idea. Then again, perhaps it's to France that we should be looking once again to turn tech into something more human.
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Alpine is French. In fact, it's very, very French.
Founded in 1955 by Jean Redele, using humble
Renault
mechanical bits to make increasingly sexy sports cars, and named for the tumbling hairpin roads of the French Alps, Alpine has been successful in rallying, at Le Mans, and fitfully in Formula One.
Bought up by Renault in the 1970s, its road-car making operations seemed to have died in the 1990s, but was resurrected in 2017 with the gorgeous, agile, tactile A110 mid-engined two-seat sports cars. The A110O, one of the very best cars that you can drive, even now, leaned hard into Alpine's heritage as a maker of light, focused sporting machines.
Alpine A290 GTS
This A290 doesn't. It's an electric hatchback, basically a new Renault 5 E-Tech wearing some rally-car cosplay in the shape of some little LED spotlights on the nose and a surprisingly aggressive bodykit down the sides. In many ways it should be a tech-heavy (battery power, Google-based software for the touchscreen) pastiche of a real car.
And yet, what Alpine and Renault have done here is to take tech and graft humanity on to it. Alpine is as close as you will get these days to a truly cottage-built operation in motoring. Its Dieppe factory is tiny by comparison to most huge car plants (and indeed the A290 isn't even built there, it's built alongside the standard Renault 5 in Douai), and so its products tend to feel a bit less ... corporate than what you'd get from, say, Porsche.
The A290 carries some of that character. It may be powered by electricity and assembled by robots, but it looks incredibly adorable. That basic Renault 5 shape is perfectly adorned by those spotlights on the nose, which are almost worth the price premium alone, and the side skirts, which stick so far out that you're always going to get muddy trousers from getting in and out.
Alpine A290 GTS
Once in the cabin is basically that of the standard Renault 5, which means a handy 10-inch touchscreen that somehow doesn't dominate the cabin. What dominates is the steering wheel, three-spoked and flat-bottomed. It's a slightly odd wheel to hold, but Alpine has been clever and has added three useful buttons to it. One, on the left, adjusts the strength of the regenerative braking and feels very tactile and satisfying to use.
Another, to the bottom right, adjusts the driving mode, and you'll probably always leave it in Sport. At the top right is a little red switch that, when pressed, activates Overtake mode. It's basically a push-to-pass button that ramps everything up to maximum attack mode when you need a burst of speed.
And the Alpine A290 has a useful burst of speed. There's a basic 180hp version (30hp up on the standard Renault 5), which is brisk enough, but there's also a 220hp GTS model, which can do the 0-100km/h run in a decent 6.4 seconds, and which feels quite entertainingly quick on the road, especially when you've pressed the little red button.
Alpine A290 GTS
However, this is very definitely not an EV that's only fun in a straight line. Alpine has retained the basic suspension layout of the Renault 5, but every part is bespoke, the track is wider, and the 19-inch alloys wear sporty Michelin Pilot tyres. Oh, and the regenerative braking is backed up by Brembo brake calipers lifted from the A110 sports car.
So it's fun. Properly fun. The steering is lively and chatty, which is just as well, as the 300Nm coming from the electric motor can actually trigger quite a bit of torque steer, which is entertaining in a pleasingly unruly fashion. The A290 is firmly sprung, but never harsh and, thanks to hydraulic bump-stops, it deals exceptionally well with the worst of Irish roads. Grip is strong, but not so much so that it feels dead in your hands. It is a classic hot hatch – not so fast that you need to be constantly sweating about speed cameras, but so much fun around corners that you will smile and giggle on almost every drive. In a word, it's adorable.
Range? A bit less than the Renault 5. The Alpine uses the same 52kWh battery, but with more power and stickier tyres, it's limited to a range of 385km for the 180hp version, and 364km for this GTS. It's just about enough, as long as you're not planning on constantly ragging it from Mizen to Malin and back.
The best bit might be the price, though. At €36,690 for the basic 180hp version, the Alpine is only a little more expensive than the Renault 5 E-Tech, and the €2,000 upgrade to get the 220hp version seems like an absolute bargain. The most you can spend on an A290, for now, is €44,700, and that's for the bells-and-whistles Premiere Edition, which isn't worth it. The slight trip wire for some might be that, for now, there's only one dealership – Windsor Motormall in north Dublin, and you can't get an Alpine serviced at a regular Renault dealership as there are too many bespoke bits.
Is a standard Renault 5 roughly 90 per cent as much fun for a bit less cash? Yes, it is, but that's not the point here.
The point here is that tech now has a human face and a human feel. Alpine has taken EV technology and bent it to its original 1955 will – the will to make a car that's fast, fun, and accessible. This kind of fun doesn't divide us, it joins us together. And the fact that it comes with rally spotlights just makes it all the better.
