ALPINE HAS REVEALED the battery-powered A110 E-ternité as an intriguing glimpse of the marque’s all-electric future.
The one-off is not only the brand’s first electric car but also its first drop-top, featuring a removable roof section that has minimal impact on the car’s rigidity and silhouette.
Based on the same chassis as the current production car, it uses battery packs from the Renault Mégane E-Tech but houses them in bespoke casings and spreads them around the chassis for optimum weight distribution: there are four at the front and eight at the rear, in a bid to maintain the A110’s characteristic mid-engined handling characteristics.
The cells weigh 392kg, but Alpine claims to have increased the prototype’s kerb weight by a total of only 258kg, putting the E-ternité at 1378kg at the kerb. That’s not only good news for its handling characteristics but also for its efficiency: Alpine claims a range of 261 miles per charge.