Parody vs tribute: a fine line

Pure electric? Check. Platform from an EV supermini via its more pedestrian sibling brand? Check. Designed to be a retro-futuristic version of an icon? Check. Alpine’s A290 and the Abarth 500 EV have a lot in common, but we’re pleased to report the Alpine doesn’t make the Abarth’s mistake of emitting a not-very-convincing fake engine sound.

While the exterior design’s transition from Renault to Alpine involves mostly small changes, the A290b’s wild interior has a lot more blue-sky thinking (and, unfortunately, won’t make production). Villain and his team have imagined the A290b’s cockpit like some sort of cyberpunk McLaren F1, with a central driver’s seat in a cocooning space trimmed with machined metals, bars of light accenting the sharp angles and almost all of the controls being housed on a Formula 1-style steering wheel.

Villain says that motorsport link is deliberate, connecting the A290b to Alpine’s F1 team and emphasising the shared vision and know-how uniting Alpine’s road and motorsport divisions. To ram the point home, Villain points out that the production car’s steering wheel will benefit from the same race-inspired ‘boost’ button the concept car features, marked with ‘OV’ for ‘overtake.’

The production-spec A290 will use the same CMF-B EV platform as the R5 and upcoming Micra, but the

A290b hints at some performance car upgrades that could arrive with the production car in 2024. The beta test’s platform features a new multi-link rear suspension set-up, for example, as well as four-piston Brembo brakes from the A110 and a sophisticated ABS system with 11 settings. Wet, Dry and Full drive modes are accessed via the steering wheel, too.

Expect it to have more shove than the R5 when it arrives, even if the platform’s standard 52kWh battery pack remains the same size; Alpine hints that it’s taken know-how from its A110 E-Ternité electric project and put it into practice.

Gilles Le Borgne, Renault’s VP for engineering, told CAR in 2022 that he and his team ‘can put the motor from the CMF-EV platform’ into the smaller architecture, which is a 215bhp e-motor used by the Megane E-Tech and Nissan Ariya. ‘The [Alpine] battery will be almost the same [as the base Renault’s] but I have to increase the current for performance,’ he added; ‘this’ll have some