Has Alpine's new hot hathback struck a chord with enthusiasts?

Clio RS may be dead but its spirit lives on in the new A290, says Prior

I’ve just spent some minutes talking to Autocar’s road testers about the Alpine A290, the quick version of the new Renault 5 EV.

What’s great is that we weren’t talking about where the charge port was or how far it could go or whether the driver assistance systems were infuriating.

Instead it was an old-fashioned chat about lift-off oversteer (not as much as in an old Renaultsport hot hatch but more than most of the competition) and whether it should have had an additional steering knuckle on its MacPherson struts to reduce its torque steer (it just about gets away with it).

They were also intrigued that Alpine had left it front-wheel drive, rather than taking any temptation, if it had any, to add rear-wheel drive to the mix by fitting another motor at the back.

That’s something that’s “technically possible”, admitted Alpine, but only slightly reluctantly to a direct question about it, at the A290 launch event. 

The truth is that almost anything is technically possible, but it comes with cost and complexity, and besides, Alpine is still a fan, it professes, of lightweight cars.

And if an electric car can’t be as light, at least not yet, as a similarly sized and powered combustion-engined car, Alpine can do things with control weights and suspension response to at least make it feel lighter than any of the competition.

The near-1500kg A290 is weighty by ICE car standards for a sub-four-metre-long hatch, but in the greater scheme of modern EVs, it’s really not so much.

Deciding that it should have the same 52kWh battery size as the regular 5 and keep front-wheel drive only might have just been a budgetary decision, but I think it’s also a wise one from a dynamic perspective.

As our Illya Verpraet just said to me, if you find an EV that offers a choice of two- or four- wheel drive, it’s almost a certainty that the 2WD version drives better.

I’ve thought and said it of the Porsche Taycan and the Volvo EX30: the rear-driven, single-motor variants ride more deftly and steer more sweetly and with more agility than the pokier dual-motor counterparts.

Anyway, I’m just pleased to find a new car that talks to enthusiasts in the way we were used to talking about cars. The A290 is a new-tech vehicle with an old-school feel.