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Alpine is edging closer to marking its 2017 return to the sports car market with another Vision Concept that is 80 per cent production ready.
The revived sporting division of Renault will next year take on the Lotus Exige, Alfa Romeo 4C and Porsche Cayman with a sleek-looking two-seat mid-engined coupe that is claimed to run 0-100km/h in less than 4.5 seconds.
Alpine has confirmed a turbocharged four-cylinder engine will power the vehicle, but further specifications are missing.
Alpine states that “weight-saving and agility are valued over pure power” and that the production car development would not have been possible without “the knowledge of Renault Sport’s ‘technical wizards’”.
The show car features two pedals and paddleshifters, further hinting at the utilisation of a dual-clutch automatic transmission, while the cabin’s centre tunnel uses a ‘floating’ style that would not permit a manual lever sprouting from it. Alpine’s CEO Bernard Ollivier is on-record saying he forecasts the manual transmission would be dead in five or 10 years.
“4C is very, very frugal, very simple … and it’s not very practical for the daily use. “Alpine will be premium, with a French touch, very free and very simple, for France, not for Germany.”
Alpine will unveil its full production version, “before the end of 2016, prior to taking on the challenging premium sports car market in 2017.” It’s a market that Alpine forecasts will grow 50 per cent globally by 2020.
“In terms of Australia we’ve expressed a strong interest for Alpine, we’ve had a very positive response to that business case but it’s not 100 per cent signed off and without the vehicle signed off it’s hard to commit to exact timing,” Renault Australia corporate communications manager Emily Fadeyev told MOTOR.
