New Alpine A390 electric SUV to challenge the Porsche Macan

The all-new Alpine A390 will be unveiled on 27 May, as the French performance brand – known for making sports cars and hot hatches – winds up to take a big swing at the Porsche Macan Electric with its five-seater ‘Sport Fastback’.

Alpine seems confident the A390 is ready for this fight, with the brand’s VP for product performance, Sovany Ang, telling us the sporty electric SUV will drive like its featherweight A110 sports cars. 

A bold claim, but the A390 will be available with a tri-motor powertrain – using one on the front axle, and two at the rear – that could deliver up to 600bhp, plus all-wheel-drive traction and active torque vectoring to boost agility through the corners. A less potent dual-motor version will be offered as well, we’ve been told.

Underneath, the A390 will sit on the AmpR Medium platform (previously known as CMF-EV) – the same bespoke EV architecture used by the Renault Scenic and Nissan Ariya family SUVs. But as well as the new tri-motor se-tup, Alpine will be making numerous chassis tweaks, not least a wider track and larger brakes.

Alpine is calling the A390 a ‘sport fastback’ rather than an SUV, and it’s not hard to see why given the incredibly athletic silhouette and quite brutish design previewed by the A390_ß concept shown last year, which we’ve been told is very close to the production car’s styling.

We can see from the sole teaser image released so far that the A390 will sport a full-width light bar, complex lighting signature and Alpine lettering on its sharply-point nose, just like the concept.

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As with Alpine’s other models, the A390 follows a simple naming convention of the letter A followed by three numbers. The first digit refers to the coupe-SUV’s size, compared with the Alpine A290 hot hatch, for instance, while 90 denotes this is one of the brand’s more versatile, everyday models. 

The A390 will be the next addition to Alpine’s “dream garage” of seven brand-new pure-electric cars that it’s hoping to complete by 2030, and has just started to become a reality following the launch of the A290. 

Two more SUVs are scheduled to be launched in 2027 and 2028, the largest of which should rival the Porsche Cayenne. Also on the way is the next iteration of the Alpine A110 sports car, which will be followed by a roadster version, a four-seat sports coupé that will bring back the Alpine A310 name from the seventies and eighties.

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