► The start of our Alpine A110 long-term test
► We live with the flyweight sports car
► Base-spec model, a few choice options
It’s seven years since Renault resurrected the Alpine brand with the delectable Alpine A110 and this car still feels joyously peculiar and unlikely. As the rest of the automotive herd migrates towards battery-driven electric SUVs, the reborn Alpine brand swerved left in 2017, with a compact, aluminium, two-seater sports coupe, with rear-wheel drive and a mid-mounted engine.
What a statement! What a car! What a relief, that someone still believes in this kind of thing.
Well – for a while, anyway. Alpine has already revealed its electric future, and the next A110 – due in 2025 – will of course be battery powered. Sad but inevitable I guess.
But for now, this ultra-light, rear-drive, petrol-engined car lives on, and this year Alpine has given the A110 a refresh, offering a new R Turini version on top of the existing GT, S and A110 R models, and updating equipment levels and the onboard tech. This, then, is our last chance to use an A110 for a few precious weeks and find out what it’s like to live with, before this little jewel is lost.
The example that joins the CAR fleet is the standard Alpine A110, which means 249bhp from a 1.8-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine and a £54,490 on-the-road price. It’s the cheapest of the A110 range (the GT starts at £65k, the hardcore R version at £97k) but nothing about it says ‘base spec’, especially as our car has a few optional extras added.
Finished in a dark Abyss Blue paint (£840) and with the standard 18-inch dark grey diamond-cut Serac wheels it looks sensational when you meet it parked on the side of the road, the pointy nose and curvaceous arches making it look as slippery as a wet bar of soap.
It’s also tiny – it looks more like Mazda MX-5 scale than Porsche Cayman, another reason it stands out in a world where a Mini is the size of a Range Rover and a Range Rover is the size of a bus.
Climb in (through an aluminium door so light you suspect it’s made of cardboard when you swing it open) and the interior is also pocket-sized. It’s perfectly comfortable, with the one-piece sports seats and small, thick-rimmed steering wheel, but look around and you realise there are no door pockets and the only cupholder is so far behind your left elbow you almost have to undo your seatbelt to use it.
So it’s an intimate, spartan space – perfectly in keeping with its lightweight sporty character, but a little short on long-journey convenience.
The controls are also minimalist. Apart from a few rocker switches and a dash-mounted touchscreen, the eye is immediately drawn to two big red buttons: a start-stop in the centre console and the mode selector on the steering wheel.
Our car also has some options fitted – among them the upgraded Focal audio system, which is certainly worth the £555 asking price, as are the parking camera and sensor (£1095); however, I’m not sure there’s much value in the optional £470 ‘Storage’ pack that gives you a small box-with-a-lid mounted on the bulkhead behind your shoulders, or the blue logo in the steering wheel centre – an £85 option.
Our car also has optional Alpine logos on the front wings (£120), and inside it has blue stitching (£95), floor mats (£120) and what they call Alpine Telematics (£285), an information upgrade that allows you to check out things such as gearbox temperature and steering wheel angle on the touchscreen (should you enjoy bar charts while you drive), plus there’s a stopwatch, which might come in handy if you want to do a trackday.
Altogether, the optional extras lift our car’s price to £59,515. (A base-spec Porsche 718 Cayman is £52k, for comparison.)
Thankfully, there’s one item above all else on our Alpine A110 that is standard – the one feature that informs everything about this car: the kerbweight remains an impressive 1102kg, making it much lighter than a 718 or Lotus Emira.
That lightness allows the chassis to be softly sprung, which in turn gives the car its agile, athletic, cat-like feel over the bumps and potholes of your average British back road. It’s a few years since I drove an A110, and my first drive in this car made me realise how rare that feeling is these days.
Compared to the pinned-down, tightened-up feel of most modern performance cars, the Alpine feels loose; it moves around and dances over subtle changes in camber. It actually needs steering down the road with delicate hand movements, rather just pointing and firing like a bullet.
In Sport mode the optional Active Sports Exhaust (£1410) growls and pops and crackles, filling the cabin with a distinctly old-world sports-car soundtrack, adding to the drama and the buzz. It’s not a playful car, in the sense that it’s not a slidey-sideways wet-roundabout headbanger – at the limit it will always push wide at the front. But it’s very satisfying to drive neatly and quickly, a compact little rocket for a late-night blast home.
Altogether I love it and I can’t believe how lucky I am every time I look out of the window and see it parked up outside my house. It’ll be interesting to see if that love affair will fade after I’ve lived with it for a few weeks – but I already feel like that would be a failure on my part, rather than the car’s, if that were to happen. Time will tell if I’m just being hopelessly romantic.
Read more Our Cars long-term tests here
Logbook: Alpine A110
Price £54,490 (£59,515 as tested)
Performance 1790cc turbo four-cylinder, 249bhp, 4.5sec 0-62mph, 155mph
Efficiency 40.3mpg (official), 27.8mpg (tested), 130g/km CO2
Energy cost 23.2p per mile
Miles this month 662
Total miles 1452