This is our first official look at the all-electric Alpine hot hatch in concept form
The upcoming Renault 5 EV will spawn a hot Alpine-badged variant and the French firm has given us our first teaser of the new hot hatch with a shadowy image of the Alpine A290_β show car.
From Renault’s offering we’ve already managed to create an exclusive image of what we think the new Alpine version will look like and a darkened side profile teaser image has revealed even more design details of the car.
Alpine says the ‘2’ in the name refers to the vehicle’s size, the ‘90’ is used for Alpine’s “multi-purpose sports vehicles” and ‘β’ signifies this is a ‘beta’ model not ready for production. The Alpine A290_β show car will be unveiled in Bristol on 9 May.
Other than that, concrete details are slim – although Alpine says the A290_β foreshadows the brand’s future electric hot hatch. We can however estimate that some crossover of technology will be made with Renault’s electric cars.
Alpine’s executive vice-president for engineering, Gilles le Borgne, has previously confirmed to Auto Express that not only will the Alpine be a warmed-up version of the Renault 5, but also that it will use a front-mounted motor producing 215bhp – the same powertrain found on the Megane E-Tech Electric crossover. Depending on weight and gearing, this means the car could deliver a 0-62mph time of around six seconds.
“One of the dream garage will be a derivative of the R5”, le Borgne said. When asked if the more powerful e-motor from Renault’s forthcoming Mégane E-Tech Electric could fit into the more compact CMF-BEV architecture that will underpin the new R5, he revealed that: “The final answer is yes, because we want to do Alpine cars. By shortening the engine [for the regular R5] it has the global installation. We’ll adjust the track because it’ll be a more sporty look on the R5 Alpine.”
The French sports car brand is due to switch to pure-electric vehicles by the middle of this decade, and has already issued teasers for what it calls its ‘dream garage’ range of cars – a large SUV with a coupe roofline, a sports car developed with Lotus, and the muscular-looking R5 hot hatch.
Le Borgne also revealed that Alpine is developing a four-wheel drive multi-electric motor setup for its sporty SUV, with torque vectoring rear motors, but the R5 hot hatch will be exclusively front driven – there are “no current plans” to offer such a layout for the hot hatchback.
It’s likely that the R5 Alpine would have the larger 52kWh battery offered in the CMF-BEV platform, to deliver a range north of 200 miles. The chassis should lend itself to higher performance, with MacPherson struts expected at the front (CMF-BEV shares many components with the CMF-B platform that underpins the current Clio) and a multi-link layout at the rear.
Now read our review of the Renault 5 Turbo 3E concept…
Keyword: New Alpine R5 hot hatch to be previewed by A290_β concept