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If you are going to base your new hot hatch on any of the current Supermini’s, a Renault 5 is a pretty good place to start. We love the ‘5’ so when we heard that Alpine, a company that makes one of the most entertaining ICE sports cars, was making the A290 we had some expectations. Spoiler they delivered.
Firstly the Alpine follows the rule book, taking a compact Supermini as the base car means less weight, a shorter wheelbase and that small car feeling. This is good. Next it should be brisk not ‘loose your licence’ quick, and it should be front wheel drive but with an adjustable chassis. Finally it needs to have a sense of fun, best achieved by lots of colour combinations, and personalisation options. Tick, Tick, Tick.
A good deal of the development work has been spent on the good stuff, that is the suspension and brakes. This shows, as features such as the inclusion of hydraulic bump stops, multilink rear suspension, a bespoke motor subframe, and Brembo brake components demonstrate that Apline wasn’t interested in just throwing a body kit on. This is proper engineering that is evident from the first mile. The result is agility, good ride quality, excellent body control and a very well calibrated brake pedal which adds up to lots of fun and a sense that the A290 is up for taking the long way home. Crucially there is controllable lift off oversteer which is critical to making a fun front wheel drive car, and you can build up to the limits with stability control, and switch everything off when you are comfortable.
Inside there has been some attempt to differentiate from the Renault, with a focus on extra driver focussed features such as a mode button that allows quick selection of drive modes, a button that controls ADAS features, a switch that controls regen settings (four levels) and slightly mysteriously a lever that just provides full power (like the errrr accelerator pedal does!). Combined with physical switches for things like ventilation control the result is very ease to use, tactile and good looking. We wish more manufacturers would take this approach and not rely on screens.
The A290 is affordable, brisk, and crucially fun to drive. It also looks great and has a well designed interior which wouldn’t feel out of place in a car twice the price. Caveats? Well the range is acceptable but not great, but we think it is a fair compromise to keep the dimensions, price and weight down. Ultimately a bigger battery would lead to a bigger heavier car that needed more power, if Alpine had asked our opinion we would have voted to keep things simple and we are delighted that Alpine did just that.
Read our full Alpine A290 GTS First Drive electric review
Estimated real world range: 165 – 235 miles
Official range: 235 miles
Official electricity consumption: 160 Wh/km
Battery pack: 52 kWh (net) lithium ion; 8 year / 100,000 mile warranty
Recharge time: 7 kW charge approx 6 hours 57 mins (15 – 100%); 11 kW charge approx 4 hours 22 mins; Rapid CCS 50 kW 47 mins (15 – 80%); Ultra Rapid CCS 100 kW 30 mins
Please note that CO2 emissions quoted for electric cars are not directly comparable to diesel and petrol cars. This is because CO2 emissions quoted are calculated by Green Car Guide and include the emissions created at the power station turning fuel (e.g. gas etc) into electricity and in transmitting and distributing the electricity to an end user. They do not include the actual production of the fuel (e.g. gas extraction and refinery emissions). Petrol and diesel emissions are supplied by car manufacturers and are based solely on the fuel burnt in the engine (tailpipe emissions) and do not include the production of the fuel or distribution to a fuel station. In practice this means that electric car emissions are over-estimated relative to petrol and diesel. For instance if an electric car, a petrol car, and a diesel car are all reported to emit 100 g/km CO2, the electric car actually has lower emissions.
