Alpine A290 prototype review – first taste of new electric hot hatch
Alpine’s all-electric future starts here, with the A290 hot hatch. We test a prototype in the frozen north
Power unit engineer Alexandre de Sousa has just asked me to put my foot to the floor from a standing start, in a prototype Alpine A290. We are on polished sheet ice, on the surface of a frozen lake in northern Sweden. The accelerator pedal hits the stop and the front Michelins – conventional winter tyres, without studs – slip a little, grip a little, smoothly metering out the power and allowing the electric hot hatch to gather pace swiftly. Then we hit the brakes just as hard, on a split surface – polished ice under the right-hand wheels and graded, grippier ice beneath the left – and the A290 stops equally undramatically, ABS and electronic brake distribution working away in the background to keep its path straight and true.
This is the kind of development work the vast majority of new cars undergo, of course. Numerous other automotive industry winter test bases neighbour Alpine’s centre, just inside the Arctic Circle. And no doubt other camouflaged prototypes are carrying out similar tests at this very moment. But the trio of Alpine A290 prototypes we’re driving today bring their own, unique challenges. Taming the instant torque of an electric motor is no easy task; this car needs to be easy and intuitive to drive, enough so to make it a cornerstone of Alpine’s new era as an EV brand, selling cars with wider appeal than the A110 sports car — and it needs to be rewarding enough to live up to Alpine’s heritage and, perhaps hardest of all, appeal to enthusiasts such as you and I.
The Alpine A290 production car has already been unveiled, with first customers taking deliveries in autumn. As previewed by the A290_β concept car last year, and explored in detail in evo 318, it is closely related to the new Renault 5 electric hatch. It’s far from a badge engineering exercise, however. The A290’s dynamics are being developed separately from the R5; its tracks are 6cm wider; it will be powered by a higher-output motor with either 174bhp or 217bhp; its brakes are different; its tyres bespoke; on the suspension front, it has a whole different front end from the R5, and there are hydraulic bump stops all round; it has its own suite of driving modes, and the way its ‘throttle’ and brakes respond is unique to the A290. It has a visual identity all of its own too, with its broader sills, arches and distinctive X-motif light pods (the subject of many a long design meeting, insiders say).
While the prototypes are heavily disguised, you still get a sense of their wheel-at-each-corner, classic hot hatch stance. The wheels – with two designs, one with a similar square-inside-the-circle design to the show car – measure 19 inches (compared with 18 for the R5), with a choice of three different Michelin tyres developed specifically for the A290. Just under four metres long and just over 1.5m high, it’s slightly shorter and slightly taller than a Renault Clio, with a similar wheelbase. Kerb weight is claimed to be 1479kg.
Once inside the driving position is comfortable, with a decent range of adjustment, and the A290 gets its own steering wheel with extra controls nodding to Alpine’s Formula 1 operation. A blue ‘RCH’ switch, for ‘recharge,’ is used to toggle the regenerative braking modes. It’s the same shape as the switch Ocon and Gasly use to alter the KERS system in their F1 cars. An ‘OV,’ for overtake, button is a power boost, delivering extra performance for up to 10sec.
Although it features a different motor from the R5, there’s just the one, powering the front wheels via a single-speed transmission and powered by a 52kWh battery. 2023’s Alpine A290_β concept packed two motors, driving a front wheel each, but the A290 production car is a single-motor affair. Making it all-wheel-drive wasn’t an option; although it is expected to be significantly more expensive than the R5, it must still be a reasonably affordable car to drive the sales volumes Alpine needs to reach financial balance and become a profitable contributor to the wider Renault group.
We head for an Elk-test-style coned gate to swerve through, and a more open slalom course. With the electronic stability control (ESC) switched on, it’s remarkable how composed the A290 remains while being flicked through a narrow gate of cones on the ice at 40mph or more. With it switched off, it can achieve big angles, and be pulled straight with the throttle. Alexandre says his favourite game is to flick the A290 into 360 spins – in the name of science, of course.
There isn’t a limited-slip differential; the diff is a traditional set-up but it is combined with torque vectoring by braking, to mimic the effect of a limited-slip unit. When the ESC is active, it uses a combination of braking and control of the electric motor to govern the car’s stability. When it's switched off, there is no intervention from the braking system at all, but the A290 does retain a certain amount of traction control: with instant torque from 0rpm, the electric motor could otherwise spin the front tyres to V-max while the car is barely moving. So a certain level of TC is very helpful, but the wheels do spin, and you can push the nose wide under power just as you would in a conventional hot hatch with the stability systems switched off.
The front brakes adopt the calipers from the A110, with slightly different pistons to account for the different weight and distribution. When you press the brake pedal, the A290 slows by a combination of regenerative braking and the conventional friction brakes. The RCH switch toggles four levels of regenerative braking: no regen at all, allowing the car to coast (the most efficient for saving energy), and three levels of regen, from light to relatively heavy (though still less extreme than some EVs). You can mix and match drive modes with regen settings, and with the lightest regen, de Sousa says it’s intended to feel similar to the engine braking you get in an A110 when you lift from the throttle – for a uniform feel across the different Alpine models but also to make the car feel intuitive, smooth and pleasant to drive.
That philosophy extends to the accelerator pedal’s response too: many EVs have a sensitive ‘throttle’ for the shock and awe of instant, dramatic acceleration. Alpine isn’t a fan of this, pointing out that it can be tiresome after a while, make passengers feel uncomfortable and is less precise for performance driving. So, again, the benchmark for the accelerator pedal’s response in Normal mode is similar to that of the 1.8-litre turbo engine in the A110 sports car.
If drivers do want a more dramatic kick of instant EV acceleration, however, there’s the OV button. Hold this down and the A290 leaps forward smartly enough to push you back in your seat. It’s hard to gauge the acceleration on a frozen lake, but it feels very brisk to me. I’d wager the car will feel most enjoyable using the regular, A110-inspired accelerator map, however.
We switch to another A290 prototype, with studded tyres and chassis tuning engineer Quentin Verheecke in the passenger seat, and head to the handling circuits. The power steering feels light, though it’s far from easy to tell its ultimate weighting on ice, of course. Verheecke explains that the steering too is intended to feel very similar in weight and response to that of the A110 sports car (which was also honed at this test centre). The weighting increases very slightly in Sport mode but not dramatically so; the ‘easy sportiness’ of light steering is considered an Alpine hallmark.
Sport mode also relaxes the stability control slightly. In Normal mode it’s extremely safe: you can be really quite clumsy and violent with your inputs on the wheel and pedals on the ice circle and it remains steadfastly stable. The stability systems’ influence is subtle though; it’s only in extreme situations where you feel it nipping at the brakes to control the car’s trajectory. Sport allows a reasonable amount of movement, the car shimmying and pivoting into gentle oversteer with a lift of the throttle, but it’s still very safe; you’d have to be really trying to get it dramatically out of shape.
With ESC off, the A290 rotates into lift-off oversteer like a traditional hot hatch. It’s not snappy when it does so, and it feels less sensitive than, for example, a Renault Sport Megane (although that car has been used in benchmark testing), because the Alpine is intended to have its own character.
It’s difficult to make any judgements on ride quality on a frozen lake but Alpine says that the suspension (by passive dampers, with a MacPherson strut arrangement at the front mounted to an A290-specific aluminium subframe, and a multi-link arrangement at the rear as per the R5) will offer a smooth ride – again, considered one of the tents of Alpine dynamics. ‘We don’t want the car to be too stiff,’ says vice president of engineering Robert Bonetto. ‘It should be very easy in all conditions. The multi-link rear suspension has been a big help; if you have a stable rear axle, you can have more precision. When we saw the platform, and the multi-link rear, we were happy with that…’
The A290 will be available with three tyre choices (two summer, one winter tyre), specifically developed for it by Michelin. The engineers say that tyre development for a car such as this is particularly challenging, because of the extra weight compared with a combustion car, the extra torque on demand, and the need to find a trade-off between grip for performance and reduced rolling resistance for range. Although an e-motor can be more linear in its delivery than an engine, the instant torque from zero makes managing traction a real challenge, the team explains.
We leave the engineering team to their work, fine-tuning the A290’s handling balance in low-grip conditions and continuing to calibrate its powertrain, braking, drive modes and traction and stability control systems, along with their various other engineering tasks.
This will be the only new Alpine to share a platform with Renault. The Alpine models to follow – starting with an electric C-segment sports crossover, to be revealed next year, followed by an electric sports car successor to the A110 – will be built on a new, Alpine-specific platform. The brand has committed to launch four further new electric models by 2030.
While the cars we are driving today are specially built prototypes, not fully representative of the final mass-production car, we can consider the way they drive to be very much representative. It’s hard to make too many concrete observations on a frozen lake (no pun intended) but there’s a lot of promise: the prototypes feel easy and intuitive to drive, with smooth and measured responses and well-communicated limits. With an emphasis on smooth ride quality and ease of use, you sense the A290 might not feel as spine-tinglingly involving as some Renault Sport hatches of old, but it’s a car engineered to have its own identity and feel. And, promisingly, the engineers don’t rule out the possibility of a more focused version in future. Regardless, this could be one of the most – if not the most – enjoyable mainstream EVs yet. We’ll find out in summer.
