Renault to boost low-volume Alpine brand with 3 EVs

Renault will turn its Alpine sports-car unit into an all-electric brand and expand it with three new full-electric models, including an EV developed with Lotus Cars.

Alpine will get an entry-level hatchback based on Renault-Nissan alliance's CMF-B EV platform and an SUV based on the alliance's CMF-EV platform.

Alpine and Lotus will co-operate on an electric sports car that will arrive in 2025 when Alpine's only model at present, the A110 coupe, will need to be replaced to meet new emissions targets and other tighter regulations, Renault CEO Luca de Meo said.

Alpine will remain a niche brand "but we can multiply the business by a factor of 10 or 20 easily by using the efforts of Renault," de Meo said in an online presentation on Thursday.

Alpine will absorb Renault’s performance arm, RenaultSport, which now produces fast versions of Renault models such as the Clio and Megane. The brand will be promoted globally via the Alpine Formula 1 team, which was rebranded from Renault for the 2021 season.

A darkened image of the three models in Renault’s slide presentation on Thursday showed a new headlight design for Alpine that suggests its cars will be more differentiated from standard Renault cars than today’s RenaultSport versions.

De Meo said Renault's partnership with Lotus, which is owned by China's Geely, made sense because the two brands shared similar beliefs. "Lotus and Alpine are two sides of the same coin," he said.

Alpine aims to price the car co-developed by Lotus as close as possible to that of the A110, which starts at 58,000 euros ($70,000) in France.

The addition of an electric drivetrain will inevitably make it slightly more expensive, de Meo said. He said the goal of the joint Alpine and Lotus developers “was to create an exciting car.”

Lotus is developing an electric hypercar called the Evija that will launch the UK-based automaker’s move to electrification.

Any new sports car developed with Alpine will sit well below the Evija, possibly as a replacement for Lotus’s long-running Elise entry model.

Renault said it targets Alpine to be profitable by 2025, including investments in motorsports.

Alpine and Lotus are selling cars to a dwindling market of sports car enthusiasts, so the collaboration makes sense financially. Both companies use bonded aluminum chassis for their sports cars, enabling them to a develop a car that uses their shared expertise in this production process.

"Our companies have much in common – from a pioneering pedigree in light-weighting, to championship-winning sportscars," Lotus CEO Phil Popham said in a statement.

The brands will also explore offering companies their joint services and pool their engineering expertise.

Former Google executive Laurent Rossi became Alpine CEO on Jan. 11 in a promotion from his position as Renault’s head of director of strategy and business development.

Former Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn revived Alpine in 2017 with the retro-styled A110 after the brand had been dormant since its peak as an iconic sports-car maker in the 1960s and 1970s.

British sports car maker Caterham initially collaborated with Alpine on the revived A110 but pulled out before the project was complete. Caterham sells a much-adapted version of Lotus’s original sports cars, the Seven.