Alpine resurrects 'major icon' with A310 Vision
Original A310 was not the sensation Alpine needed - but you could hardly ask for a finer 'retro-futuristic' template
While Peugeot and Citroen have clearly woken up to the idea of going head-on with reinterpretations of historical icons, Renault has been at it for some time - and with great success, too. Alpine obviously has many fewer cars to pay homage to, though with the 50th (and 55th for the V6) anniversaries upon us, clearly the chance to hark back to the A310 with a ‘retro-futuristic’ vision of what the sports car might look like if it were built today proved irresistible. And good it did.
Exploring one’s stylistic roots is always more fun when you’ve got something distinctive to work from, and Alpine’s fibreglass wedge certainly qualifies as that. The original A310 was its maker’s attempt - encouraged by Renault’s loftier ambitions for the brand - to graduate to a larger, more GT-ish sports car from the characteristically bijou A110. Half a century later, for now at any rate, Alpine is more interested in the sort of one-off concept that attracts eyeballs at the Paris show (check), and proving just how versatile its new APP architecture is.
The latter, of course, is the platform also underpinning the new electric A110 - a car somewhat conspicuous for its absence in the French capital, save for a mostly pointless sculpture - though as show floor fillers go, the A310 Vision is worthy recompense. Revealed in 1971, its spiritual predecessor was famous for being as era-appropriate as a Led Zeppelin album, and proud of it. That didn’t make it successful (the later, chunkier V6 was an attempt to revive flagging sails of the original four-pot version), nor a particularly adequate rival to the greater prestige and performance of a Porsche 911 (c’est la vie); but it does make it memorable.
Clearly, Alpine’s modern-day designers thought so; while they were apparently keen not to mimic the A310’s design slavishly, there’s no mistaking where its ‘low, wide and sculptural sense of sportiness’ has come from. The numbers underline this approach: the concept is said to be 4.55m long, 1.18m high, slightly more than 2m wide, with a wheelbase of under 2.5m. Significantly larger and not quite as low as its inspiration (shock), though illustrative of just how accommodating the modular platform can be if its maker is ever inclined to ‘explore new proportions, new volumes and new interpretations of Alpine’s design language’.
Of course, we know it is inclined to do all these things, because it has previously confirmed that a production 2+2 will be among the variants it hopes to introduce in the wake of a successful A110 launch. Probably it won’t look much like the A310 Vision - it has all the hallmarks of a one-off Paris show special, including headlights integrated into a flexion that pop down on startup, and the kind of bonnet S-ducts you could lose a volleyball in. But this surely signifies the start of the journey toward a roomier, more usable Alpine sports car - much as it did the first time around.
As a lively contemporary reimagining of a ‘very seventies design’, we could hardly ask more of the concept (who doesn’t love a car on massive A-shaped alloys?), though probably you can forget about Renault rustling up a 21st-century version of the A310’s PRV V6. While a combustion engine is still mooted for Alpine’s future, it remains a distant prospect for now - especially with the A110’s unveiling set for the short term, lest Porsche’s battery-powered 718 build an unassailable lead in the EV sports car market. Alpine knows all too well the sting of finishing a distant second to Stuttgart. Still, if its rival has anything as intriguing as the A310 Vision in its back pocket, we’ve not seen it yet…
Gassing Station | General Gassing | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff