New Alpine A390 ‘sport fastback’ snapped testing for the first time
We’ll get our first proper look at Alpine’s next EV when a concept version is unveiled next month
Alpine has been talking about the “dream garage” of electric cars it will launch for some time, but that vision is starting to become a reality. The new Alpine A390 is the French performance brand’s first crack at an electric SUV, and we’ve now spotted it testing ahead of the official reveal in 2025.
Alpine is calling the A390 a ‘sport fastback’ rather than an SUV, and it’s not hard to see why given the very athletic silhouette and aggressively sloped roofline visible in the first spy pictures. It has a similar shape to the Cupra Tavascan and Polestar 4, which are both potential rivals.
We’ll get a much better idea of what’s under the camouflage very soon, as Alpine is unveiling the A390_ß concept on 11 October. This will preview the production version that’s on track to enter production in 2025.
The A390 will sit on the AmpR Medium platform (formerly CMF-EV) – the same bespoke EV architecture used by the Renault Scenic and Nissan Ariya family SUVs. Of course, Alpine will have made tweaks to the chassis and focused more on handling.
In 2021, Alpine’s now-former engineering boss Gilles Le Borgne told Auto Express that the A390 was likely to feature a triple-motor powertrain, incorporating a 215bhp electric motor on the front axle and two more e-motors at the rear. Considering the mechanically-related Nissan Ariya Nismo is able to produce 429bhp from a dual-motor set-up, we wouldn’t be surprised if the A390 delivered closer to 500bhp.
Le Borgne added, “We want to do torque vectoring, have really amazing handling and performance – as you can imagine for an Alpine”. More recently in 2023, Emmanuel Al Nawakil, now-former vice president of sales and operations at Alpine, told us that the A390 “will have vital differences underneath to other models with our own battery and gearbox.”
Like Alpine’s other models, the A390 follows a simple naming convention of the letter A followed by three numbers. The first digit refers to the coupe-SUV’s size, compared to the Alpine A290 hot hatch for instance, while 90 denotes this is one of the brand’s more versatile, everyday models.
The A390 is one of seven new pure-electric models Alpine intends to launch by 2030. Others include the aforement A290 that was unveiled in the summer, and the next iteration of the Alpine A110 sports car. Two more SUVs are scheduled to launch in 2027 and 2028, which we’ve been told will be positioned to rival the Porsche Macan and Cayenne.
Also in the works is a roadster based on the zero-emissions A110, and a four-seat sports coupe that will bring back the Alpine A310 name from the Seventies and Eighties.
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