2025 Alpine A390 GT Review: An Alpine, But Not As You Know It

A390? Isn’t that a road in Devon?

Yes, you’re right. But it’s also new territory for Renault’s reborn Alpine brand. First came the A110 eight years ago, and we saw that it was excellent, but lightweight sports cars for nerds are not a sustainable business model make. 

So while that car approaches its sunset in its petrol-powered form, Alpine is expanding its remit. Best think of it these days as sort of a French Cupra, a sportier, premium-er offshoot of a mass-market player – a mixture of tuned Renaults like the A290 and standalone models like this one (although it still uses a lot of Renault bits underneath). It’s perhaps aiming for a fancier end of the market than Cupra, though, especially as it plans to launch a Porsche 911-rivalling 2+2 in a couple of years’ time.

The A390, then, is quite literally a big deal for Alpine, as the largest car ever to wear the slanted ‘A’ emblem. It’s also electric, which means good company car prospects, and a crossover, which means good sales prospects generally, even if Alpine insists it’s a ‘sports fastback’ instead. It also calls it a ‘racing car in a suit’, which feels… bold.

So what makes it different to the billion other electric crossovers on sale?

Well, for starters, where most of its rivals use two motors, the A390 has three. One drives the front axle as normal, but there’s one per wheel on the rear, which employ active torque vectoring, something Alpine says allows it to stand apart from rivals dynamically.

Those three motors currently come in two power outputs. There’s a range-topping GTS, producing 464bhp and 608lb ft of torque, but we’ve been driving the entry-level GT – same motor setup, but 395bhp and 488lb ft, which is good for 0-62mph in 4.8 seconds and an EV-typical top speed of 124mph.

It’s telling that Alpine’s avoided going crazy with power, at least at launch – opt for a mid-range Porsche Macan 4S and you’re getting more shove than the top A390 GTS (although you’re also paying about £7000 more), and the base GT is less powerful and over a second slower to 62mph than the considerably cheaper and smaller twin-motor Volvo EX30.

This is refreshing, though, in an era when EVs are constantly getting silly amounts of power chucked at them that they can’t really handle, and anyway, Alpines have never been about raw pace.

They’re about corners, right?

Right, and corners are something the A390 does well. Tight, well-weighted steering guides a pointy front end, and for such a hefty beast – a 2124kg kerbweight – it’s able to stay remarkably flat through corners.

Some of that’s doubtless down to the really heavy bit, the 89kWh battery, being kept nice and low down in a skateboard arrangement, and the generally low-slung silhouette keeping the overall centre of gravity down.

Also useful is the 49/51 front-rear weight distribution and, on our test cars, the Michelin Pilot Sport 4S rubber, but it’s that torque vectoring system that makes the biggest difference to the handling. Get on the power out of a tight corner and you can really feel it work, shifting more power to the outside rear wheel and tightening your line. This also helps it feel properly adjustable mid-corner, no small feat for a 2.1-tonne electric definitely-not-an-SUV-honest.

Ultimately – and we’re sorry to keep banging on about this car – it still can’t touch the similarly-priced Hyundai Ioniq 5 N in the sheer fun stakes among EVs, and when you get to the really twisty stuff, there’s only so much that clever software can do to mask the car’s heft as it tries to push wide. Besides that pesky Hyundai, though, it’s certainly a cut above most other biggish EVs.

What about the rest of the drive?

Good, largely. EVs can often have iffy brake feel but the A390 pleases with an expertly judged amount of travel and feedback, and the brakes themselves have plenty of bite too. You can also set levels of regen from none at all through to full one-pedal mode, but for spirited driving, you’re best working with the actual pedal.

It can cope with most little imperfections adeptly, with hydraulic bump stops working to keep things nice and composed, but the kinds of big, sudden compressions that occasionally litter the Spanish mountain roads making up our test route can sometimes see the dampers run out of ideas and bounce the A390 around a bit.

In GT guise, at least, it also doesn’t feel massively quick. Obviously, 4.8 seconds to 62mph is plenty for most people, and if you mash the throttle from a standstill, it’ll do the usual EV thing of pinning you back in your seat. But also quite EV typical is the way that momentum tails off quite quickly. Even using the F1-style Overtake button, a childish indulgence (in a good way) that briefly sets everything to max thrust, overtakes can take just that little bit longer than you expect.

Alright, but is anyone driving this sort of car like that?

Good point – probably not. Happily, when you just want to drive it normally, it’ll more than oblige. Like basically every big electric car, it’s comfy and quiet on the motorway, only the lack of engine thrum exacerbating the wind noise a bit.

It can feel like quite a big, wide thing to thread around narrow city streets, though, especially since all-round visibility isn’t brilliant, but none of this is an issue exclusive to the Alpine. That low-cut roofline means the back can be a bit claustrophobic, and legroom’s not great either. Kids will be fine back there, but things will get tight for adults on long journeys. The boot’s better, at 532 litres seats-up and 1643 with them down.

A note on efficiency: a couple of days blatting about on Andalucian mountain roads isn’t ever going to deliver the manufacturer’s official figures, or even a sensible real-world estimate. In the case of our GT test car, with its optional 21-inch wheels, those figures are 3.0m/kWh and a range of 313 miles, but our actual figures indicated 2.7m/kWh, equating to 240 miles. In the most literal sense of the saying, your mileage may vary.

(It should also be noted that those bigger wheels put a serious dent in range – stick with the 20s the GT comes with as standard and you get a quoted 346 miles.)

What about the interior? That’ll need to be good if Alpine’s going after Porsche.

And generally, it is. The Renault Group as a whole has been doing cabins well lately, and in the A390, all the materials you’ll be looking at and touching are up to scratch for something at its price point. It’s arguably cheapened a bit by the amount of parts sharing going on – the instrument screen and infotainment screen are lifted directly from more run-of-the-mill Renaults like the Scenic, and the row of rocker switches beneath it may now be a shiny silver, but they still look awfully familiar from my long-term Dacia Duster.

But everything works well enough and feels good enough that this is forgivable. Those physical switches are a glorious and rare triumph of logic over showy but frustrating tech, as is the single best button in the entire car industry right now – Renault’s ‘My Safety’ button that takes a simple double press to get to your preferred ADAS settings.

The infotainment runs on Google software too, meaning that while you can mirror your phone if you want, you don’t really need to if you use Google Maps for navigation and Spotify for tunes. And on the subject of tunes, our cars came fitted with the Devialet XtremeSound 12-speaker system – optional on the GT, standard on the GTS – which sounds lovely and crisp. We haven’t been able to try the standard one, but it’s basically the same system minus the swishy sound spatialisation abilities.

So should I buy one?

You mean should you lease one as your company car, right?

That depends. UK pricing has yet to be revealed, but we reckon on the GT starting at around £62,000 and the GTS closer to £70,000. There’s no getting around the fact that slap bang in the middle of that comes the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N at £65,100, and that’s before the £1500 that Hyundai will currently knock off for you as part of its in-house EV grant.

That Hyundai is still a thorn in the side of anyone else trying to make an EV with driver appeal at this price point, as it’s just more flat-out entertaining than anything else, A390 included, and does the everyday stuff well too.

But, the Alpine is stylish, comfy, decently practical, and perfectly good to drive when the mood takes you. ‘Racing car in a suit’ might be a bit ambitious, but ‘solid all-round EV in a good pair of running shoes’ is far from an insult. 

Most importantly, it’s something a bit different to the norm. That slightly left-field appeal may well limit it outside of its home market of France, but on the other hand, the UK is comfortably Alpine’s second biggest market overall and, for the past few months, has been the biggest full stop for the A290. The A390 broadens that appeal further, and if – like us – you find, say, a Macan or an Audi SQ6 E-Tron a bit too obvious, it’s ready and waiting for you. Just make sure to get it in blue.

The stats (A390 GT)

• Engine: 3x electric motors (1x front, 2x rear)
• Power (bhp): 395
• Torque (lb ft): 488
• 0-62mph: 4.8 seconds
• Top speed: 124mph
• Weight: 2124kg
• Starting price: £62,000 (est)