Changing of the Guard
At the French sports car specialists Alpine, the future has arrived in the form of their A390 electric fastback. On a test-drive in southern Spain, THE RAKE’s Motoring Editor asks whether a battery-powered ‘leviathan’ can mirror the soul of a Monte Carlo-winning classic.
France led the world in car building during the early decades of the 20th century — until, that is, production hit the buffers during the second world war, leaving choice limited well into the 1950s. One of the motors that got things going again was Renault’s ubiquitous 4CV, a four-door economy car that remained in production from 1947 to 1961, with more than one million units produced.
The French equivalent of Britain’s Morris Minor, the 4CV (an acronym that originates in the word chevaux, relating to horsepower) was designed in secret during German occupation, when the Nazis banned Renault from manufacturing anything but military or commercial vehicles. Intended to help the country get back on its feet in the post-war years, the 4CV was far from flash, and certainly no road burner. That, however, did not prevent the genius engineer Jean Rédélé from stripping one down, souping it up, and winning the 1950 Dieppe-Rouen rally. Four years and several more victories later, Rédélé clinched a class win in the prestigious Coupe des Alpes, inspiring him to establish his Dieppe-based ‘Alpine’ marque in 1955, a manufacturer that married Renault’s mechanicals with lightweight, aerodynamic bodies to create giant-killing racers.
Alpine’s gorgeous A106, A108 and A110 models, all with glass-fibre coachwork penned by Giovanni Michelotti, became the scourge of Europe’s rallying world, culminating in the A110s finishing first, second and third in Monte Carlo in 1971 and ’73. The latter was also the year in which Alpine were bought by Renault, who merged the business with their Renault Sport competition arm in 1976, keeping it on the map for the next 20 years with a string of successful race cars and its road-going A310, GTA and A610 rear-engined sports models.
But in 1995 Alpine was unceremoniously phased out. It remained mothballed until 2017, when Renault delighted fans of the early Alpine sports cars with an all-new A110 inspired by the looks of the original but with 21st-century engineering and performance.
The regular, rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive A110 and its tuned-up variants, the ‘S’ and the ‘R’, are regarded as modern classics, and have won the hearts of thousands of fans of traditional petrol-powered, driver-focused cars. If you want one, though, you best be quick: Alpine announced last year that production of the petrol A110 is being discontinued, and that the last model will be the ‘Ultime’, a 110-unit special edition that’s due to hit the road about now (replete with a Ferrari-like starting price of £222,000).
Thereafter, all A110s will be electric, just like the marque’s other models — the sporty A290 hatchback (inspired by the old Renault 5) and its most recent creation, the A390, which The Rake was invited to drive in southern Spain. The A390 is described as a ‘sport fastback’ and, as with rivals such as the Lotus Eletre and the Porsche Macan Electric, it is an attempt to transfer a reputation founded on building nimble, lightweight sports cars to a leviathan-like, five-seat, battery-powered S.U.V. weighing more than two tonnes. While Alpine once conjured images of pared-back, stripped-out, uncompromising sportsters, it has now become indicative of a luxurious level of interior trimming, with details inspired by the track, such as the A390’s flat-bottomed steering wheel and Alcantara-trimmed seats.
In reality, of course, it is nothing like its petrol-powered sports car sibling. But it is vastly more practical (five proper seats and lots of load space), and, if acceleration and decent handling are marks of ‘driving fun’, the A390 delivers.
As mentioned, it weighs more than two tonnes, but only just, and it’s considerably less corpulent than the Lotus, the Porsche or Hyundai’s ultra-rapid Ioniq 5 N. Given that a lightweight quality is synonymous with the Alpine name, the A390 had to be reasonably svelte. Indeed, its aluminium suspension bits and quick-rack steering made the twisty, billiard-table-smooth backroads between Málaga and Marbella almost as much of a delight to drive as they would have been in a conventional sports car.
The handling is enhanced by ‘active torque vectoring’, in which drive to the car’s respective wheels is increased or reduced for optimum grip in corners — a feature that works especially well on the rear axle, which carries two of the Alpine’s three electric motors. But most of my enjoyment came from a simple but entertaining feature: on its F1-inspired steering wheel, the A390 carries a red button marked ‘OV’, for ‘overtake’. Press it while your foot is down and there’s an instant and amusing power boost reminiscent of a turbocharged car of the 1980s (without the infamous ‘lag’).
I am from another era, so I can’t say it makes up for the absence of a throaty exhaust note from a high-performance petrol car, or, for that matter, the satisfaction of revving an engine into its sweet spot before deftly snicking a manual gearbox into the next ratio. But such characterful traits are of little interest to the modern-minded electric-car buyer, who’s likely to be more concerned about the plethora of functions now expected from the touchscreen ‘command centre’ in the middle of what used to be called the dashboard.
Most of my enjoyment came from a simple feature: a red button on its F1-inspired steering wheel marked ‘OV’, for ‘overtake’.
The A390 offers control over everything we’ve come to expect, plus a nifty feature that makes it possible not only to identify nearby chargers but to see how much you’ll be charged for using them. The system can be used to plan topping-up breaks along a specific route for optimum journey efficiency. With a claimed 345-mile battery range and a 20-minute re-charge sufficient for two hours of motorway driving, the A390 is heading towards the distance-devouring capabilities and quick-fill convenience of an internal combustion car.
But while the A390 has pace, space, stamina, decent looks and mod cons, I couldn’t help wishing I was tackling those Spanish switchbacks in one of Jean Rédélé’s works-prepared A110s from the early seventies — the ones with a rasping 1600cc petrol engine sucking in fuel through a brace of Weber carburettors. Still, in the words of the French songstress Édith Piaf: Non, je ne regrette rien / C’est payé, balayé, oublié/ Je me fous du passé/ Avec mes souvenirs/ J’ai allumé le feu...
