Alpine is a French sports car manufacturer owned by Renault. Alpine was originally founded in 1955 and bought by Renault in 1973. It produced Renault based small sports cars. Renault stopped producing Alpine cars in 1995 and after 22-year hiatus Renault relaunched Alpine brand in 2017 when the new Alpine A110 was introduced.
Alpine was originally founded by Jean Rédélé in 1955. Rédélé was a Renault dealer in Dieppe, France and he also raced Renaults including modified Renault 4CV’s. The first car produced by Alpine was Alpine A106 which was based on Renault 4CV mechanicals. Like the car on which it was based on the A106 was rear-engined and rear-wheel drive. It was also light. All those characteristics typical to other Alpine models that followed A106. The first A106’s had 21 horsepower and weighed 540 kg.
The A106 was produced from 1955 to 1961. The next model for Alpine was A108 from 1958 to 1963. It was an evolution of the A106.
An A110 followed next, it used Renault 8 as a starting point. The original A110 is perhaps most famous of Alpine models from the past. The A110 was in production from 1963 to 1977 and around 7,500 examples were produced during its lifetime. The first A110’s had to do with 55 SAE horsepower whereas later models had up to 127 horsepower. The weight of the car was around 700 kg.
Alpine A110 was also used in racing and its most famous achievement was winning the very first manufacturer World Rally Championship for Alpine in 1973. Alpine has also won Le Mans in 1978 with its Renault Alpine A442 racing car.
In the late 60’s and early 70’ Alpine had close collaboration with Renault and its racing operations were heavily supported by Renault and Alpine cars could be purchased from Renault dealers.
The successor to A110 was A310 which was introduced in 1971. With the global petrol crisis in 1973 Alpine was facing financial crisis and was taken over by Renault. The cars were also known as Alpine Renault’s.
Renault continued producing A110 and A310 which received couple updates during its lifetime from 1971 to 1984. It was available both with 4 cylinder and V6 engines with power ranging from 94 to 193 horsepower. It was still reasonably light car and the weights of different model variants varied from 825 to 980 kg. The total number of A310’s produced was 11,600 cars.
Later A310 evolved into GTA and A610 models and finally Renault pulled the plug on Alpine in 1995. There were no more Alpine branded cars.
More info on Alpine cars history can be found for example on the Alpine Wikipedia page and on “History of Alpine brand” PDF-document by Alpine cars.
After Renault axed Alpine brand the Alpine factory in Dieppe still continued operating in one form or another. It produced cars like Renault 5 Turbo and Renault Clio Williams. Alpine operations also evolved into Renault Sport and had a hand in developing and building Renault Sport cars. I’ve personally owned 2012 Renault Megane RS 265 Trophy which was designed by Renault Sport but built on the regular Megane production line in Spain.
Renault Sport has also been involved in developing and running numerous Renault racing cars for rallying, Formula 1 and other racing.
Renault started planning the rebirth of Alpine in the beginning of 2010’s when it created a joint venture with small British car manufacturer Caterham. The plan was to design a sports car which would be sold both as Alpine and Caterham. The co-operation didn’t work as planned and Renault and Caterham went their separate ways leaving Renault on its own.
The rebirth materialized in 2017 when the new Alpine A110 was introduced. The deliveries of that car began in 2018. The new Alpine A110 is still produced in Dieppe.
At the time of writing this (Feb 2022) Alpine has announced plans to introduce three new fully electric models by 2026. One would be the successor to A110, the second one an Alpine version of new Renault 5 and third one would be some kind of crossover. It looks like current A110 will be the only combustion engine Alpine which will be built by the new reborn Alpine.