Alpine A110 Review 2024

Alpine A110 At A Glance

4/5
Honest John Overall Rating
The Alpine A110 is a hugely competent, engaging and entertaining proposition. Few, if any, modern cars offer such a fun driving experience at relatively sensible speeds.

+Great fun to drive, fine chassis balance and plenty of performance for the road, light and agile, hugely engaging and rich in feel for the driver.

-Interior materials sub-par on a car with a near £50,000 price tag, not exactly practical, it's a pity there's no manual gearbox option.

New prices start from £49,905
Insurance Group 44

The Alpine A110 might have seemed like an automotive second coming when it arrived a few years ago. Car enthusiasts and journalists alike raved about this pretty new sports car as a simple, puristic and refreshingly engaging driver's car that doesn't need to be driven at silly speeds to be fun. Our Alpine A110 review shows it's worthy of praise but also not quite perfection.

Renault revived the sporting Alpine brand a few years ago, dusting off a model badge last tacked to the back of a car in 1977. It then had its designers create a modern interpretation of the car that wore it, trawled its history books for evocative, bygone motorsport successes – a win in the 1971 Monte Carlo Rally and overall title win in the ’73 world rally championship, no less – and set about building a new sports car.

The automotive world, or at least the enthusiast portion of it, was in rapture. With its emphasis on low mass, fine balance and purity of response, the Alpine A110 is the lightweight foil to its bloated, overpowered sports car contemporaries. 

The result is, and remains, impressive. The lightest A110 is just 1098kg, making it an absolute featherweight among its sports car rivals, while its predecessor’s history gives the new A110 an admirable back story. Thing is, back in ‘71 a win at the Monte Carlo Rally genuinely was front page news, today the only way an Alpine would make the front pages – or, these days, go viral - is if a Kardashian crashed one in Casino Square.

All of that makes the Alpine A110 a very tough sell, as the sports car market is arguably more about being seen and brand image than real purist driver thrills these days. You just need to look at Lotus sales figures to appreciate that. 

It’s a committed buyer who picks this French unknown over the default Porsche, then, but that rather closed, knowledgeable shop is arguably part of the Alpine A110’s allure to its core buyers.

Indeed, even the name needs explaining, pronounced ‘Alpeen’, as opposed to how you might describe the scent of a toilet freshener, and owners will likely enjoy telling you exactly how to say it.  

The brochure for the A110 extols things like compactness, weight distribution and power to weight ratios, as well as its predecessor’s rallying exploits and successes, but for all but a handful of enthusiasts out there that’s pretty much irrelevant, particularly if you’re used to current sports cars.

It's a car you might graduate up to from a focussed hot hatch, or hugely compromised Caterham, rather than sell your Porsche Cayman, BMW Z4 or Audi TT for. All of which makes that market position, and pricing a tricky sell, however brilliant it might prove on your favourite road. 

And it is brilliant, the A110’s balance is extraordinary, the chassis people at Alpine making it supple and controlled, which makes it perfect the choppy tarmac that passes for roads in the UK.

The engine might be modest in its output, but with so little mass to shift it’s quick enough to be fun, but not so rapid that you’ve always one eye on the speedometer while puckering the seat material beneath you in fear of your licence.

As drivers we all love it, but, and it’s a big but, for all the fun it delivers it has to be compromised to do so, which is detrimental to its overall appeal for those but all the more committed card-carrying driving enthusiasts. 

Alpine added an S model a couple of years after the standard A110’s 2017 debut, it gaining some power, more grip and stiffer, more focussed suspension. Its reception has been mixed, as in doing what all other sports car firms do, and have been doing for years, Alpine has somewhat diluted the A110’s raison d’etre with its range-topping model. That was fixed with the Legende GT car which has the S model's engine, but with the standard car's softer suspension. 

What does a Alpine A110 cost?