Have You Ever Wanted to Rally an Electric Car? Alpine A290 Is The Answer
Image Credit: Alpine.
The idea of an electric rally car has always struck me as a bit silent. Rallying is a sport of glorious, eardrum-shattering noise, flying gravel, and the occasional, unscheduled meeting with a tree. It's about internal combustion engines screaming their little hearts out. So, when the folks at Alpine, the French purveyors of excellent sports cars, announced an all-electric rally machine, I had to investigate. An EV for chucking down a muddy forest stage? Surely, that has to be like bringing a vegan sausage to a Texas barbecue, right?
But then I saw it. The Alpine A290 Rallye. And it's a proper little firecracker. It's based on the new A290 hot hatch, which, alongside its sibling the Renault 5, somehow managed to win the 2025 Car of the Year award. This is not some pie-in-the-sky concept. This is a real, tangible, hand-built competition car you can actually buy. For a price, of course. A rather specific price of around $70,000, to be precise. That's a 40 percent premium over the road car it's based on (which already is not that cheap), but for that, you get something genuinely special.
Image Credit: Alpine.
Surprisingly, that seventy grand doesn't get you more power, which is an interesting choice. The A290 Rallye uses the exact same single electric motor as the top-spec road car, sending 217 horsepower to the front wheels. In a world of ludicrously overpowered EVs, 217 ponies sounds a bit tame, but in a lightweight rally car on a loose surface, trust me, it's more than enough to get you into a world of trouble. Or, if you're any good, a world of fun.
It turns out that the clever bits aren't in the motor. They're in the chassis. Alpine's engineers, who clearly know their way around a rally stage, have thrown out the standard road car gubbins and fitted some serious competition hardware - proper ALP Racing Suspension, a ZF mechanical limited-slip differential to tame that instant electric torque, and bigger brakes. The front rotors have grown from a perfectly adequate 12.6 inches to a much more serious 13.8 inches, now clamped by six-piston calipers. That's the kind of stopping power you'll be thankful for when you approach a hairpin bend far, far too quickly.
Image Credit: Alpine.
And speaking of hairpin bends, this is where the A290 Rallye truly won me over. It has a hydraulic handbrake. Yes, a proper, honest-to-goodness, yank-it-and-you-go-sideways lever. This is the single most important tool in a rally driver's arsenal for executing those beautiful, crowd-pleasing skids. In an electric car! It's a wonderful, magnificent, and slightly silly concession to pure fun. It's the engineers acknowledging that even without pistons and valves, the joy of a perfectly executed Scandinavian flick is universal.
Of course, being a proper FIA-compliant rally car, this A290 has been stripped out and caged. Inside, you'll find Sabelt bucket seats that will hug you tighter than your grandma after a year away, and a welded roll cage that politely suggests you should probably wear a helmet. All the fluffy carpets and creature comforts of the road car have been unceremoniously booted out in the name of weight saving and safety. It's a serious office for a serious job.
But let's circle back to my initial complaint: the silence. An electric motor just hums. It's efficient, it's smooth, but it has all the soul and drama of a domestic appliance. How can you get the crowd excited when your car sounds like a milk float? Alpine's answer is brilliantly absurd. They've fitted a new external sound generator. The road car already has a synthesized soundtrack, but this is a whole new level of fakery. It's a bespoke noise-making machine designed specifically to scare pedestrians and get rally fans cheering. The sound it emits changes with your speed and how hard you're pressing the go-pedal. Is it ridiculous? Absolutely. Do I love it? Well…
This little electric beast is being built by hand in Alpine's competition workshop in Dieppe, the same place where their legendary rally cars of the past were born. That heritage is important. It shows that Alpine isn't just jumping on the EV bandwagon; they're trying to figure out how to make their electric future as exciting as their gasoline-powered past. The A290 Rallye is an entry ticket, designed for privateer drivers to compete in local and national rallies. It's a grassroots effort, and I have a lot of time for that.
Image Credit: Alpine.
Buyers will even get an invitation to a special one-off rally event in France, complete with all the technical support and, crucially, a dedicated charging infrastructure. That last part is key. You can have the most brilliant electric rally car in the world, but it's just a very expensive paperweight if you can't plug it in between stages. It seems Alpine has thought this through.
The Alpine A290 Rallye is an electric car trying to succeed in a world of glorious noise. It's a fascinating and charming contradiction. It's expensive, yes, but it's also a hand-built, properly engineered piece of kit with a hydraulic handbrake and a dedicated button for making silly noises. This little French bulldog is a joyful, spark-spitting, mud-flinging proof that the future of fun driving might just be electric after all. I'm still a skeptic, but I'm a skeptic with a very big grin on my face.
