22 March 2022
I had the funds to make my dream of buying an A110 a reality in late 2021. Next step was to decide if I wanted to buy a new or used car and which options would be essential.
I had followed Alpine market since the car had been made available in 2018 and it seemed like the used cars for sale on the Continental Europe held their value quite well. So well in fact that when I did a little bit of an analysis on the used A110's available on the German Mobile.de site the end-result was that the average asking price of an A110 was higher than its price was when new. At that point the oldest cars were over three years old and even those examples were on average priced higher than when they were new.
Another factor to take into account when deciding if buying new or used example was Finnish car registration tax system. When you register a car in Finland you have to pay high registration taxes which are based on the tax-free price of the car and on the CO2 value for a specific car. If you want to buy an expensive car with high CO2 then you have to be prepared to support our government quite a bit. For example a new Porsche 911 Turbo S is 224,000 EUR before registration taxes but you have to pay 172,000 EUR taxes to get that car registered in Finland. Total price 396,000 EUR. Nice!
Luckily an Alpine A110 has quite low fuel consumption and CO2 figures compared to its rivals. Some of the first A110's had CO2 figure of 141 g/km or 144 g/km based on NEDC driving cycle. The latest 2022 version has CO2 figure starting from 152 g/km based on the newer WLTP cycle. The differences in CO2 figures has actually a big importance on the amount of registration taxes. The NEDC and WLTP cycles have their own tax rates and the taxes for a car with 144 g/km NEDC could be several thousand euros higher than for a car with 152 g/km WLTP. That meant that buying a used A110 could actually mean that it would end up being lot more expensive than a new car. A new car would be in the cards then.
Good thing about buying a new car is that you can choose any options you like. Bad thing is that you also have to pay for all the options.
My funds were limited so I had to be very careful in choosing options. An additional consideration in relation to options is that you have to pay registration taxes for the options also here in Finland. Therefore any option you would choose would also mean more taxes. On top of that if an option would increase the CO2 value, that would also mean an additional increase in registration taxes. For example choosing larger wheels might mean more CO2 and therefore higher taxes so 1,000 EUR option might end up costing much more.
Let's start with the colour. The presentation colour for Alpine A110 was Alpine Blue (Bleu Alpine) which is a lovely traditional Alpine colour. I also happen to like blue colour a lot.
Alpine Blue is very popular colour for the new A110's and it seems like a large percentage of the A110's have that colour. Well, it is a lovely colour and I also liked it quite much. However due to budget constraints I also considered two other colours which were Abyss Blue which is darker shade of blue compared to Alpine Blue and Thunder Grey. The price for the Abyss Blue and Thunder Grey was 840 EUR in Germany whereas Alpine Blue would be 1,840 EUR. Alpine also offers a long list of Atelier colours some of which look stunning. Unfortunately the price for Atelier colours is almost 5,000 EUR so they were out of my price range.
It would've been nice to be able to see the colours (and other options) live but that posed a little problem. There were no Alpine dealers in Finland so it was not possible to see the car live anywhere near me. In fact the only Alpine dealer in the Nordic countries was in Stockholm, Sweden. I was doing regular business trips to Stockholm and my plan was to visit the Stockholm dealership at some point. I kept pushing that visit forward until I was in a position where buying an A110 actually seemed realistic. That point was close in early 2020 and I had planned to visit the Stockholm dealership in spring 2020 on my next trip to Stockholm. Then COVID hit the world and all business trips were cancelled for a long time.
This of course meant that I had to choose the colour and all the options without ever seeing an Alpine A110 live.
With regards to colour my final choice was the Alpine Blue.
One option which I struggled with was the sport exhaust. Basically all the videos on the internet were showing cars with the sport exhaust and I couldn't find a single video which would illustrate how the standard exhaust sounds like. What I could tell from the videos was that the sport exhaust makes nice sounds and pops and bangs on sport mode. However since sport exhaust is a 1,520 EUR option in Germany I decided not to take it since it would've taken the price of the car out of my budget. If at some point I'm not happy with the standard exhaust then there are also aftermarket exhausts available.
Once the colour and exhaust was decided it was time choose wheels. The standard wheels on A110 are 17" 10-spoke wheels and I don't particularly like the design of those wheels. Alpine offers three different 18" wheels for the A110. The forged Fuchs wheels are lightest ones and also the most expensive. Then there are multi-spoke Grand Prix wheels which look very nice in my opinion. For both the Fuchs and Grand Prix wheels Alpine requires you to get also the bigger brake option which costs additional 1,020 EUR in Germany. Basically that ruled those wheels out for me. I just didn't have the budget for them. The third 18" wheel option was Serac wheels which didn't require big brakes. That was my choice.
Why not choose big brakes? First of all, the cost was a big factor, and secondly I think that the standard brakes with 296 mm discs would be perfectly fine for me. I'm not planning to take the car to track so I don't think that I need the bigger 320 mm brakes.
I also opted for Alpine Telemetrics which allow me to see engine oil temperature. I had similar option on my Megane RS and used that to show the oil temperature. All the other stuff on the telemetrics is not at all important to me but I like to know when the oil temperature is high enough to rev the engine a little bit more.
Also the parking sensors front/rear and reversing camera were chosen as well as Focal audio system.
This is the complete list of the options on my car:
A detailed list of standard equipment and main options for the A110 can be found here.
22 March 2022
The most convenient place for me to buy an A110 would've been the only Nordic dealer in Stockholm. Unfortunately Sweden does not have euro as their currency (as we do in Finland) and the exchange rates would've meant that buying a car from there would've been couple of thousand euros more expensive than from an euro currency country.
Therefore I turned my attention to other euro countries. Basically the prices before local taxes on all euro countries for the A110 were pretty much the same. Additionally Alpine has a very strict policy on discounts and it seems like you have to pay the list price everywhere.
I sent a request for an offer to few dealers in euro zone countries in December 2021. Responses confirmed the fact that discounts really are hard to come by.
It seemed like one dealer wanted to sell the car to me and that was Mario Tiné from the Alpine Antwerp in Belgium.
After few emails and one phone call I ended up signing an order form for an Alpine A110 with Alpine Antwerp on the last days of 2021.
Alpine Antwerp had few A110's pre-ordered and one of them was modified to my desire. The expected delivery time would be approx. 3 months from the order and the car should arrive to Alpine Antwerp at the end of March. My plan is to pick up the car sometimes in April 2022. We'll see how everything goes but so far things look good.
9 May 2022
The car arrived to the dealership as planned at the end of March 2022. We still had 50 cm of snow at that time and I didn't want to bring a car with summer tyres to these conditions. Therefore I made travel arrangements so that I would pick up the car on the last week of April.
The trip to pick up the car started with a flight from Helsinki to Amsterdam on the 23 April 2022. From Amsterdam airport it was an hour and a half train trip to Antwerp where I spent few days before picking up the car. I hadn't been to Antwerp before and the city turned out to be a nice place to visit.
The salesman Mario picked me up from my hotel on the morning of 26 April as we had agreed. Naturally he arrived on a nice Alpine A110. This was the first time ever that I saw a new A110.
The delivery of my car took place on a delivery center which was on a different location to the actual Alpine Antwerp dealership. My Alpine was there waiting for me under the covers.
After some paperwork and thorough hand-over process I was ready to hit the road. My destination for the first day was Bremen in Germany which was approx. 450 km from Antwerp. The car had 12 km on the clock when it was handed over to me and according to Alpine the revs should be mostly kept under 3,500 rpm during the running-in period. Therefore I had to restrain myself in the beginning.
I had planned a route which would keep me mostly out of the highways while in Belgium and the Netherlands. That gave me a chance to get to know the car better and to see Belgian and Dutch countryside and small towns. When I arrived to Germany I would drive mostly on highways/autobahns.
After a long but enjoyable day I arrived to Bremen in the evening where I would spend next two nights.
The last strech of my trip in Germany took me from Bremen to Travemünde. The shortest route would've been two hours drive on the autobahn but my ferry from Travemünde would leave very late in the evening so I was in no hurry. Therefore I took the very long route instead. Well, perhaps not so long in distance but much slower route on the smaller roads.
It was quite nice way to spend a day driving a brand new Alpine through the German countryside on a lovely spring day.
After seven hours I arrived to the Travemünde harbour where I still had to wait a while before I could board the ferry.
From Travemünde to Helsinki the ferry trip took 30 hours and I had two nights and one whole day to spend on the ferry.
I arrived to Finland on the 30 April 2022 and had spent a week on the trip. The car had 900 km on the clock when I arrived home. The trip took me to new places like Antwerp and Bremen where I spent couple of days enjoying the cities. Most importantly I had a good chance to familarize myself with the car. Running-in period is still ongoing so I need to be careful with the car but I already have a good picture of the car - and I can say that I've enjoyed it very much so far. I will write more about the car itself on the My A110 experiences section later on.
15 June 2022
I now have paid all the Finnish taxes for the car and have Finnish license plates.
There are few steps to follow when importing a car to Finland. First of all you have to make a tax return to tax authorities. Then at some point they will make a decision on how much registration tax you have to pay.
Secondly you have to report to the car registration authorities to let them know that you have imported a car to Finland. That allows you to get temporary Finnish license plates which allows you to use the car while waiting for the tax authorities to make their decision.
I imported my car to Finland on 30 April 2022 and at that point the tax authorities informed on their website that on average it would take two months to process car registration tax returns plus possibly few additional weeks on top of that for car which would go to what is called a manual value estimation process.
The registration taxes are based on the estimated monetary value and the Co2 value for the car. The value of the imported car is not determined based on what you actually paid for the car. Instead the tax authorities try to determine the value based on the value for a similar car available on the Finnish market. In the case of a rare car this is a bit of a lottery since you don't know how much taxes you have to pay when you import a car. This was also the case with my A110 since there are no A110s on sale in Finland.
In case of a new car you also have to pay VAT in Finland. I had paid the 21 % Belgian VAT when I bought the car, and once I had the car in Finland I also paid the 24 % Finnish VAT. The next step was to ask the Belgian VAT to be refunded by the dealer.
One step in the process is that you also have to MOT the car to get it registered in Finland. I went to the MOT at the beginning of June and provided them a CoC certificate for my car. Otherwise everything went smoothly but they informed me that there are some new regulations coming on 6 July 2022 which would mean that if all taxes have not been paid by then, it would not be easy to get the car registered in Finland.
Based on the estimated processing times for the car registration tax decisions it looked likely that I would not get my A110 registered before that deadline. Due to that I called tax authorities to ask for a more detailed estimate on the processing time. They told me that they would try to make the decision faster, and that also happened since I received the tax decision only one week later on 9 June 2022.
I paid the registration taxes immediately and picked up the Finnish license plates on 10 June 2022 which would be the date when my car was officially registered in Finland.
Overall a car worth a little bit more than 60,000 EUR was suddenly a 80,000 EUR car when all the local taxes had been paid. Cheap as chips!
On the bright side, the relatively low Co2 value (153 g/km WLTP) of the A110 means that the taxes for A110 are much lower than for a Porsche Cayman for example. A base model Cayman has Co2 value of 201 g/km, which would mean that registration taxes for Cayman with similar tax free value as A110 would be approx. 13,000 EUR higher than for A110. Yes, you read that right, 13.000 EUR more taxes for Cayman due to higher Co2 value.
Next: My A110 experiences.