Electric Alpine A110 vs. Porsche Cayman EV: U.S. Launch, Specs, and Details

The next-gen Alpine A110 goes electric and could come to America. Here’s what we know.

Nearly three years have passed since former Renault CEO Luca de Meo suggested Renault was looking at a return to the U.S. market in 2027 or 2028 by way of its Alpine sports car brand. A lot has changed since then: The Trump administration’s chaotic tariff policy has made planning more difficult, and de Meo left Renault in September 2025 to take over as CEO of Kering, the Italian luxury goods business that, among other things, owns brands such as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. What hasn’t changed is the product development strategy. Renault now has the hardware ready that would allow Alpine vehicles to be sold in America.

Alpine Still Has Its Eyes on the U.S.

Since its 2017 launch, the lovely little Alpine A110, a cleverly executed homage to the Renault-powered mid-engine coupé of the same name developed by Renault dealer and rally driver Jean Rédélé in Dieppe, France, in 1962, has been one of our favorite sports cars. It’s light and fast and flows down the road, its supple suspension delivering terrific grip and a great ride. Gordon Murray, the man who designed the McLaren F1 and GMA T.50, as well as a string of world championship-winning Formula 1 cars for Brabham and McLaren, has one as his daily driver. ’Nuff said.

Why the Original A110 Never Made It Stateside

Unfortunately, the Alpine A110 has remained forbidden fruit for American enthusiasts, though former chief vehicle engineer and program director David Twohig told MotorTrend the company gave serious consideration to launching it in the U.S., with sales and servicing to be handled through Nissan’s 200-odd American Infiniti dealers. But crash regulations for unbelted occupants killed the idea. “We could have passed them,” Twohig said. “I had a solution for it, and we could have engineered it, but it would’ve added mass and complexity to the car.”

Production of today’s A110 ends this summer, in part because its electrical architecture, based on that of the fourth-generation Renault Clio hatchback built from 2012–19, cannot support new driver assistance systems mandated in Europe, most notably automatic emergency braking. The car will be sorely missed. But a new A110 is nearing final development and could be sold in America this time around. There’s just one small catch: It’s an EV. Though that’s not necessarily bad news.

An Electric Reinvention With Big Promises

Alpine’s new A110 will be built on an all-new high-performance lightweight EV architecture dubbed the Alpine Performance Platform (APP) that was developed in-house at Renault. As with the outgoing A110’s chassis, APP is made up of bonded, welded, and riveted aluminum extrusions, castings, and pressings. But instead of a mid-mounted 1.8-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine, the new A110 will be powered by two e-motors mounted at the rear axle and driving the rear wheels. Alpine has yet to reveal the power and torque outputs of these e-motors, but there’s little doubt the car will have more than the 248-horsepower and 236-lb-ft figures of the soon-to-be-superseded base A110.

Battery packs will be located ahead of and behind the central passenger compartment rather than under the floor to allow a low sports car seating position and a 40/60 front to rear weight distribution. APP has an 800-volt electrical architecture to allows for fast charging, and a new centralized electronic control system, the Alpine Dynamic Model (ADM), will oversee the integrated functioning of the battery management and the e-motors, managing the new A110’s brakes, steering, and active aerodynamics. The new A110 will also have the in-house-developed Alpine Active Torque Vectoring system (AATV) that can vary torque between the left and right rear wheels every 10 milliseconds.

The electric A110 will be quick. The big challenge for Alpine’s engineers is to make it ride and handle with the same delicacy and deftness of the combustion engine car, which weighs a feathery 2,380 pounds in base trim. Alpine CEO Philippe Krief said the electric A110’s target weight is about 3,100 pounds. That’s ambitious, given rumors out of Stuttgart, Germany, suggesting Porsche engineers are sweating blood trying to ensure the forthcoming 718 Cayman EV, the electric A110’s most obvious rival, weighs no more than 4,000 pounds.

Can Alpine Crack the U.S. and the EV Sports Car Problem?

The electric powertrain, combined with a state-of-the-moment electrical architecture that enables the car to have the full suite of mandated driver aids, means homologating the new Alpine A110 for the U.S. market would be relatively straightforward. And the recently launched Alpine A390, a Porsche Macan EV competitor that’s been well received in Europe in terms of its performance and dynamics, shows the brand is already pivoting to making larger vehicles that would fit into more mainstream U.S. market vehicle segments, as former CEO de Meo predicted it would in 2023. But why would Renault, which ignominiously exited the U.S. in 1987, want to return to one of the world’s toughest car markets with a brand known to only a few automotive enthusiasts?

A Premium Brand With a Built-In Backstory

In 2016, then Renault-Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn carefully made it clear that Alpine would be a separate, standalone brand. He wanted Alpine to be seen as a premium company, able to command higher profits and fatter margins than Renault or Nissan vehicles. But he also knew from Nissan’s bitter experience with Infiniti that launching a premium brand from scratch was expensive and time-consuming. For American consumers whose memories of Renault are of mediocre cars such as the Alliance and Medallion, Alpine would be a new premium brand. But unlike Infiniti, it comes with a ready-made backstory and a billion-dollar marketing platform.

The backstory? Like the outgoing model, the new electric A110’s exterior design will reference the 1962 original, a car that secured historic 1-2-3 finishes in the 1971 and 1973 editions of the Monte Carlo Rally and gave Alpine overall victory in the 1973 World Rally Championship.

The billion-dollar marketing platform? F1. Renault owns 76 percent of the Alpine F1 team. The remaining 24 percent is owned by U.S.-based investment firm Otro Capital, which is looking to sell. Among those interested in buying are Mercedes F1 boss Toto Wolff, former Red Bull F1 team principal Christian Horner, and Steve Cohen, owner of the New York Mets.

Thanks to Drive to Survive, F1 is now viewed as a mainstream sports league in America. Of course, football and basketball and baseball dominate in terms of audience size, but more than half the NFL fans in the U.S. are aged 55 or older, while 43 percent of F1’s fans are allegedly 35 or under, and the fastest-growing group among them is women aged 16–24. Alpine may not be a familiar brand on the road, but there are plenty of young and social-media-savvy F1 fans who know of it. Leveraging that awareness would be a very powerful way to launch the brand in this country. In terms of a sales and distribution network, Renault is believed to have held discussions about Alpine with mega-dealer AutoNation, which operates more than 250 locations representing 35 different brands across 15 states. AutoNation partnered with the Alpine F1 team at the 2023 Miami Grand Prix.

The Big Question: Do Buyers Even Want an Electric Sports Car?

While the electric-powered Alpine A110 could be an interesting and entertaining alternative to the Porsche 718 Cayman EV, the elephant in the room remains: Few people appear to be particularly interested in electric-powered sports cars—witness the panic in Stuttgart as engineers are frantically re-engineering the 718 Cayman and Boxster EV platform to accommodate a combustion engine, as well.

Alpine CEO Krief is unconcerned, however. He says the APP platform can readily accommodate a combustion powertrain. Now convergence platforms—those that are designed to accommodate both electric and combustion powertrains—tend to be heavier, more complicated, and more compromised than those designed specifically for a singular format. But Krief insisted this is not the case with the APP architecture. “We can install a combustion engine with a low technical impact,” he said.