The Alpine A110 remains a rare sight on UK roads, despite receiving nothing but glowing praise in the five years it’s been on sale here. What makes this lightweight gem so special, and just why doesn’t it have a bigger audience?
Pretty much everything about the modern-day Alpine A110 signalled bravery on Renault’s part. It was brave of them to build a small, relatively affordable mid-engined sports car in the first place, in a market and industry increasingly hostile to cars of that nature. It was brave of them to badge it as an Alpine, a name that, back in 2017, didn’t have huge brand recognition beyond rally geeks and French people. In another way, it was brave of them to only offer it with a four-cylinder and a dual-clutch gearbox, when most of its small gaggle of competitors still offered six cylinders and three pedals.
The result of that bravery is one of the most unique, complete and enticing sports car packages there’s ever been. If you’re bored of seeing the A110 receive near-endless praise from automotive media, stop reading now. If you’re still unsure on what makes this tiny, fleetingly rare little bundle of Frenchness so enthralling, then allow us to elaborate.
The A110 arrived back in 2017 after what seemed like endless teases, concept cars and false starts for Renault’s long-held ambition to revive the Alpine brand, a name that it still owned but that had laid dormant since 1995 when the last A610s were built.
It is, of course, the resurrection of a name, and a modern take on a design, from the 1960s. The original A110 was an impossibly petite coupé, best known as the car that won the inaugural World Rally Championship in 1973.
Alpine – which has now subsumed the Renaultsport name and replaced it as Renault’s performance-oriented sub-brand – is based in Dieppe, perched on the northern coast of France. This is an important point to note, because while the A110’s design is filled with little tricolour nods to its Gallic heritage, it’s almost as if Alpine’s engineers were peering across the English Channel and looking at Britain’s broken, lumpy, winding country roads. This car is so perfectly suited to the UK that maybe Pennine A110 would have been a better name.
We’ve been spending time with the most basic A110 available – there’s not even a trim level suffixing the name; it’s simply called an Alpine A110. That means 249bhp from the 1.8-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine, lifted from the outgoing Renaultsport Megane and dropped in the middle of the car to power the rear wheels. As with all A110s, that engine’s hooked to a seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox. Three other core versions are available – the more luxurious GT, the firmed-up S, and the super-hardcore, carbon-and-aero-slathered R, all of which offer 296bhp. This though, is as pure as the A110 gets, and unless you’re planning on regular track days, it’s probably the one to have.
That power figure seems tame – weedy even – in a modern context. The entry-level, 2.0-litre Porsche 718 Cayman has 296bhp, for instance. Thanks to an all-aluminium chassis and body, though, the A110 has a kerb weight of just 1102kg. This is simply extraordinary in a car that still has to comply with stringent safety regulations and offer enough creature comforts to tempt people into making a left turn just before walking into the Porsche showroom.
This obsession with saving weight has led to a deeply compelling package. That low-sounding power figure suddenly becomes everything you could ever need for the road. It’s enough to propel the A110 from a standstill to 62mph in a quoted 4.5 seconds, but the real payoff is in the ride and handling.
With so little weight to move around, the most minute of steering inputs in the A110 elicit an instant, synapse-quick response, giving you utmost confidence to place the car exactly where you need it in a series of bends. The litheness makes it an impossibly playful, agile car, its upper limits of grip far above what you’d ever reasonably encounter on the road.
The steering wheel itself doesn’t exactly buck and writhe snake-like in your hands like it would in an early Elise, but it tells you more than enough about the road’s camber and imperfections, and what the tyres are having to deal with.
The suspension could have been set up especially for the kind of broken, poorly maintained tarmac that defines Britain’s B-roads. It doesn’t quite offer the kind of Rolls-Royce-smooth magic carpet ride promised by some of the incredibly glowing early reviews – there’s definitely some firmness built in. The damping, though, is what really impresses.
The chassis’ composure over bumps and compressions is staggering – you can take them with commitment, and the A110 remains surefooted and unruffled. A small amount of roll built into the setup means it flows along the roads, working with imperfections rather than trying to batter them into submission.
The powertrain isn’t one of the all-time greats. The Megane motor fires up noisily and settles into a flat, mechanical idle. On the move, the turbocharger huffs and chunters, doing its best to be heard over the four-pot rasp. It’s not unpleasant, just more functional than it is evocative.
The power delivery is more entertaining, all boosty and whooshy like the best old-school turbo engines. You’ll never be pinned back into your seat under acceleration, but the power output is a perfect match for the car, imbuing it with a wonderfully co-operative personality and never threatening to overwhelm it. Pop the A110 into Sport mode, and it pulls all the usual tricks – the throttle response sharpens, auto mode holds onto gears for longer, and the exhaust fires off a repetitive ‘pop-pop-pop’ pattern on downshifts.
Speaking of downshifts – that gearbox. A lot of enthusiasts scoffed when the car was revealed with a dual-clutch auto as its only choice. Pretty much everything else that can be lumped into this small and loosely defined class – Porsche 718 Cayman, Lotus Emira, Toyota Supra and GR86, BMW M2 – still offers the option of three pedals and a stick, so it was perhaps to be expected that there’d be some kickback.
Driving the A110, though, the DCT just… works. The paddles are some of the best touchpoints in the car, with a crisp, satisfying action, and the ’box bangs out shifts quickly and eagerly. With both hands on the wheel all the time, you can concentrate more on feeling what that brilliant chassis is doing beneath you, and it fits the A110’s whole baby supercar vibe. Would a manual be a nice thing to have? Absolutely, but it doesn’t come at the cost of the entire car’s character.
What’s perhaps most impressive is that something so light and agile is still so liveable day-to-day. Car journalism cliché school instructs the writer to construct a fantasy scenario around a long weekend away for two, so here goes: the A110 will sit driver and passenger in perfectly adequate space and comfort and swallow just enough luggage for those three nights away. It will then cruise down the motorway in seventh gear getting 50mpg while you CarPlay your favourite road trip playlist. Then, when you get to your destination, which is hopefully laced with sinuous mountain roads, it will be supremely entertaining.
Gripes? A couple. The Sabelt bucket seats in the standard car are comfy and supportive, but it would be nicer to sit more reclined and with your bum closer to the ground. In all fairness, while the backrest is fixed, the owner can specify a seat height, which is set by the dealer. Our demo car had it set to the middle of three positions, so it can in fact go lower. The interior is a pleasant enough place generally, but some of the materials aren’t up to the same level as rivals. The native infotainment system is, frankly, a bit of a mess, although that’s rendered basically moot by the introduction of CarPlay and Android Auto functionality with 2022’s mid-life update. There are luggage compartments front and rear, although neither are particularly capacious.
Overall, it’s a superb package. Those niggles are few and far between, and the A110 stands out as something totally unique. In a world where even rivals like Lotus are moving away from the pursuit of lightness, the little Alpine is living proof of the benefits of keeping the kilos off. Alpine’s obsession with saving weight infuses the A110 with an agility, a purity of movement, unlike anything else still on sale with a roof or doors, while simultaneously bringing tangible benefits to boring real-world things like fuel economy and wear on consumables. It’s a recipe not really seen since – ironically – the Lotus Elise, but the A110 makes a far more convincing case as a daily.
Why, then, is this little blue streak of brilliance not selling? Demand has increased since the first couple of years of production, when sales were so sluggish that Renault considered pulling the plug on the project altogether. It’s still not exactly flying out of dealers, though. According to a well-known website that provides DVLA registration figures, as of Q1 2023 – the most recent data it has at time of writing – the total number of A110s on UK roads, of every variant and trim level, is less than 900 (with another handful SORN’d). Not brilliant for a car that’s been on sale here since 2018, especially since the Lotus Emira, another inevitable point of comparison, has apparently racked up nearly 400 registrations since 2022.
You can’t really put it down to British buyer provincialism, because Porsche have never had any issues shifting the Cayman over here. Perhaps that lack of a manual and a bigger engine really have just put enough people off, or maybe it’s a brand recognition thing. Whatever it is, the fact that the A110 remains a rarity on our roads is a massive shame, because it could have been tailor-made for this little island.
Those who do own them swear by them. A purple A110 is the focal point of Autocar editor-in-chief Steve Cropley’s garage. James May owns one. So does Gordon Murray, who uses it as a daily driver. He was so impressed by its commitment to lightness that he had his engineers at Gordon Murray Automotive tear it apart when benchmarking the T.50 hypercar. One of our first ‘I Love You, Man’ guests, Alex Dainty, is a double lower amputee, and runs a gorgeous green A110 fitted with hand controls, the lack of a manual suddenly a major selling point.
The A110’s rarity has almost assured its future classic status, especially as we won’t see its like again. Just as the Emira will be Lotus’s last internal-combustion car, and the next generation of Porsche Cayman and Boxster will be electric, Renault have confirmed that the Alpine brand’s future is firmly rooted in volts and amps. They plan to keep the petrol-powered A110 around until 2026, but even before a switch to EV kills it altogether, more stringent EU safety regulations will heavily hamper the number Alpine can sell from 2024. It will remain a one-and-done thing, a brilliant flash in the pan and a reminder of the benefits of lightness in an automotive landscape where ever-increasing weight, cost and complexity can seem a little misguided in the pursuit of efficiency. The A110 shows what happens when, to coin a phrase, you simplify and add Frenchness.
Thank you to Alpine Centre Banbury for setting us up with the A110 for a couple of weeks.
