Alpine’s Electric A110 Will Be Lighter Than a Gas-Powered Sports Car

Alpine‘s A110 is one of the best sports cars of the last decade, and a few decades before, too, with an all-electric version planned for sometime this decade. That car has a lot to live up to, but it sounds like Alpine is up for the challenge. This week, Renault CEO Luca de Meo said that the electric A110 will be lighter than the combustion engine version, and also have many of the same mid-engine driving dynamics.

The claimed lightness is the headline, though, for the simple reason that it’s difficult to make EVs light, given the weight of the massive batteries powering them. For sports car engineers, this is a particular challenge because lightness is, in many ways, the name of the game. Horsepower numbers get eyeballs, but power-to-weight ratio is the real metric that engineers keep an eye on, along with weight distribution.

For EVs, this can be self-defeating, as more range demands bigger batteries, which demands more weight, which demands more power, which demands bigger batteries, and so on. Supercar makers have only just started to even tackle the problem. For a car like the Alpine A110, which doesn’t have to set speed records, the trade-offs are less acute, which is perhaps why de Meo told Autocar that the A110 EV (pictured above under a cloak) would actually be lighter.

“The next A110 will be lighter than a comparable car with a combustion engine but with no compromise in performance,” de Meo told the publication.

A lot of that has to do with the bespoke platform Alpine is developing for its sports cars. The decision to do its own platform, instead of using another automaker’s or sharing development costs with another automaker—a deal with Lotus was reportedly discussed—was “completely stupid” and “not rational,” de Meo also said, citing the costs.

But the plan, more broadly, is for Alpine to become a French version of Porsche, and for the A110 to maybe one day be talked about in the same breath as the 911. With that kind of ambition, a bespoke platform is inevitable, perhaps even required, and Alpine unveiled the A390, its second EV, on Wednesday as some evidence of its intentions. It’s not clear whether the A390 or A110 will ever be sold in the U.S., but a bigger SUV for the U.S. has been rumored to be coming.

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Whether the A110 EV will become one of the best sports cars ever, like its predecessors, is still an open question, but for now Alpine is saying all the right things to get it there.