Alpine tore up its best sports car and started over
Same low, compact Berlinetta on the outside. Underneath, everything is new, and the third-gen A110 is electric, fighting to stay as light as ever.
Alpine showed its hand early — and may have surprised even itself. The full prototype debut was expected at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, but the French pulled the covers off the new A110 Future ahead of time. From the outside it is almost the same low, compact A110. And that is exactly where the conflict hides: the Berlinetta look stays untouched, yet the entire technical base has been rewritten from scratch.
The body is already remarkably close to production. The proportions are all there, but look closely: new front headlights, extra X-shaped elements nearer the center, a fixed triangular window in the rear pillar. At the back the changes still hide — and a first glance is easy to fool. This is no facelift of the outgoing car. This is the third generation.
But the real story is not on the surface. It is the new Alpine Performance Platform. The floor, the chassis structure and the suspension are made entirely of aluminum, and curb weight should stay under 1500 kg. For an electric sports car that is not a press-release line but a matter of survival: let the A110 get heavy, and it loses the very thing that once put it next to the Porsche 718 and the Toyota GR Supra. Not power. The lightness of its responses.
The rear electric axle uses a “3-in-1” layout: two electric motors plus a silicon carbide inverter that pushes current through faster and runs cooler. The battery, meanwhile, was deliberately split in two to bring back the 40:60 balance in favor of the rear axle. The message could not be clearer: Alpine does not want to build just a fast EV in a pretty shell. It wants to keep the soul of a sports car.
And here is the detail that says the most. The APP platform is, in theory, ready to take a combustion engine back — if the market changes its mind or the rules shift. Alpine is going electric, yet it keeps an engineering escape hatch open. Less dogma, more insurance.
What is left is not to fall out of its own niche. In Europe the current A110 starts at €69,359 — roughly $79,000. The Porsche 718, meanwhile, has shrunk at the end of its life to just two hardcore versions, the Spyder RS and the Cayman GT4 RS, and both open at €158,700, about $181,000. That is why becoming electric is not enough for the future A110. It has to stay itself: compact, light, emotional — and clearly cheaper than the big premium machines.