The Alpine A110 is dead: Iconic sports car ends production after nine years
Fewer than 30,000 second-generation A110s were made in Dieppe since 2017. A new one is on the way
The Alpine A110 has finally ended production, after a nine-year run and 28,701 examples. First revealed in March 2017 following a protracted gestation, right from the off the A110 offered a refreshing ‘less is more’ approach in the sports car segment.
It was lighter and more compact than Porsche’s Cayman and covered ground with a fleetfootedness not felt since the original S1 Lotus Elise. The Elise was a remarkable machine at the time for its lightness, innovative aluminium construction and packaging, and the similarly constructed A110 was just as much of a revelation.
Perhaps because when we drove prototypes a year before its debut they very much weren’t up to snuff, its brilliance when finished came as a hugely pleasant surprise. Perhaps because of the tighter legislative conditions it was conceived under and the unlikelihood that such a dedicated project would yield the profits big OEMs often demand. Perhaps also, along the same lines, because of how it went against the grain in terms of industry trends, taking weight and footprint reduction to the nth degree instead of throwing horsepower at an increasing kilogram figure. Instead, it had just 249bhp, which had just 1103kg to shift.
The result is one of our very favourite sports cars not just of the moment, or even of the last decade, but since the magazine was founded in 1998. Not necessarily because it does everything perfectly – far from it in fact – but because of a refreshing and novel approach to dynamics. Here is a car that flows with a road, rather than battering it into submission, Alpine favouring a supple sports car that you can savour, rather than one that pursues lap times and pace.
It could have done with less compromised interior packaging and a more emotive engine but Alpine duly made the best of what it had. (It’s also a tantalising thought to consider what the A110 might have been like with a manual gearbox but given the overwhelming global sales trend towards paddle-shifts, it was designed around the dual-clutch transmission from the off, to avoid increasing price and complexity by offering two options.) In an unlikely side quest, it also became one of the ride and handling benchmarks for the GMA T.50 supercar (an A110 having scored the esteemed position of daily driver for Gordon Murray himself).
The original Alpine A110 put up a fine fight at evo Car of the Year 2018, taking the podium spot:
‘Within a few miles the A110 feels such a natural extension of your limbs: every wrist-twisting action resulting in a crystallised moment of clarity, every lower leg flex a balanced moment of acceleration or retardation,’ editor-in-chief Stuart Gallagher said. ‘There’s such finesse about the Alpine’s approach to everything it does that you swear blind you’ve upped your game as a driver with every trip. Thrills and rewards are rarely this accessible.’
Alpine tweaked it over the years, stiffening suspension (not necessarily an improvement) and upping power to 296bhp (relatively welcome) for the A110 S, and turning it into a bona fide trackday car with the A110 R (but one that works even better on the road). Perhaps demonstrative of Alpine’s heart-over-head approach, as a final flourish, it almost totally re-engineered the car to create the Ultime run-out special: new gearbox and redesigned subframes level of re-engineered. But never has Alpine managed to morph the A110 into a car that casts the original in its shadow. Its brilliance today is as resonant as when it was new.
We’ll miss it dearly and surely, the weight of expectation on Alpine for its successor (we should be thankful there will even be one, given it was a slow burn in terms of sales) must be extraordinary. But the signs are good, with the Alpine Performance Platform being engineered for versatility (EV and combustion powertrains) as well as Alpine’s core tenets of light weight and clever packaging. The world will get its first look at a prototype at the 2026 Goodwood Festival of Speed: fingers crossed and bated breath.
