Going home

We don’t know precisely when, but sometime within the next year, and with a crisp bark from its freshly fired up 1.8-litre engine, the last Alpine A110 will drive off the line at the factory in Dieppe where it has been built since 2017.

It is popular today to paint it as a plucky failure, one beloved by motoring journalists who never spend their own money on new cars, but which failed to resonate in remotely the same way with those that do. It was, and remains a car seemingly tailor-made for that tiny community of strange people who value most compactness, light weight, smart engineering and pure driving pleasure. That’s you, in case you’re wondering. And I’d bet plenty there is a greater density of A110 owners among the Ti subscriber base than anywhere else on earth outside the Alpine owners club (or Club Alpine as it is styled).

Sales have been slow and even though they have picked up of late, as Alpine CEO Philippe Krief said to me when we spoke last week, ‘4000 cars a year is not a business’. You’ll not be surprised to know he was not the CEO when the A110 was green lit.